The little town of Dhar, in Malwa, has been a postcard for nearly a hundred years with two sentences: The stone complex in the middle of it has been a temple of Vagdevi for one set of people, the Kamal Maula Mosque for the other; and the courts and the bureaucracy have for seventy-five years or more been in the habit of avoiding this question or papering it over. The avoidance was ended by the Indore Bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court Friday afternoon. Justices Vijay Kumar Shukla and Alok Awasthi, in a 2,000-page anchored verdict, openly quoting the Ayodhya playbook, said the Bhojshala complex is, and was, a temple dedicated to Goddess Vagdevi Saraswati and set aside the administrative arrangement of 2003 when Muslims were conducting Friday namaz within the same walls.

Dhar's judgment will not stand alone. Everything now hinges on whether it can weather the constitutional bench of the Supreme Court which is hearing the challenge and the political weather of the next two years and the next nine weeks will tell us nearly all we need to know.

In layman's terms, this is what the Bench said.

Remove the legal framework and the court's decisions are stark. The bench said that the historical literature and inscriptions along with the archaeological record made it clear that Bhojshala was a centre of Sanskrit education related to Raja Bhoj and the religious nature of the structure was that of a Saraswati temple. The order of the Archaeological Survey of India, 2003, that allowed Hindus to pray between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. on Tuesday and Muslims to do namaz between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. on Friday was set aside in part for the ban on Hindu worship and part for the permission granted to Muslims. The ASI keeps administrative control of the monument. The Centre has been directed to take steps to address the long pending demand for return of the idol of Vagdevi which is kept in a London museum. Not to mention, the Bench left the door open for the Muslim community to submit an application for an alternate land parcel in Dhar district where a new mosque can be constructed; in fact, the state government was instructed to consider the application on merits.

The basis of the entire ruling is the 2,000-plus-page ASI report submitted to the court after a ninety-eight-day scientific survey. Additional Solicitor General Sunil Kumar Jain presented those facts to the court. The court's reading was focused on the ASI's conclusion that the questionable structure was constructed out of reclaimed parts of an earlier, larger temple complex from the Parmar period. It is important to note, too, that Justice Shukla had visited the place, in person, on March 24 before passing judgment a detail that suggests that the bench did not want the impression that it was "blind" in giving the verdict.

The reaction was immediate and evident on the Hindu side. Senior advocate Vishnu Shankar Jain, who has been the courtroom architect for the petitioners, called the ruling “historic” and added that the court had also raised the demand for the repatriation of the Vagdevi idol from London. The former chief minister Uma Bharti said that she was feeling elated. Vishwa Hindu Parishad accepted the verdict of the court and urged the restoration of the ancient university and the bring-back of the idol. But the devotees came to the complex in the early hours of Saturday, without the curbs on access that had to date been only in force on Tuesdays for two and a half decades.

The Muslim side's backlash was as quick as the soundbites, and much more substantial. In a press conference at Hyderabad, AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi contended that the bench had upheld three documents which are fundamental to the Muslim community the Dhar State Gazette of 1935, which has the record of the namaz held there; Waqf registration of 1985 and the Places of Worship Act of 1991, which freezes the religious character of every site as it existed on August 15, 1991. In his letter Owaisi pointed out “glaring similarities with the Babri Masjid judgment”, and hinted that the Supreme Court would “correct course”. Maulana Shahabuddin Razvi Barelvi from All India Muslim Jamaat said that the mosque 'was, is and will remain until the Day of Judgment. Dhar Shahar Qazi Waqar Sadiq reiterated that community will shift to the Supreme Court. But the Congress, represented by Digvijaya Singh, hedged, demanding legal verification and doubting the reading of the ASI report.

Where the real battle now lies – the Places of Worship Act.

That's where the analysis must take a breath and level with itself. The statute of 1991 is not a "piece of incidental legislation. The Act specifically forbids any conversion of a place of worship, and requires that the religious character of each be preserved as it existed on Independence Day, 1947. The only exception was the case of Ayodhya which was already pending in court at the time of the enactment of the Act. In 2019, the Supreme Court in the Ayodhya case reaffirmed the validity of the 1991 Act and found it to be "intrinsically related to the obligations of a secular state.

But what has changed since then is that it is now a three-judge bench presided by Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna which is hearing a constitutional challenge to the same provisions Owaisi who cited Friday. That bench on 12 December had also suspended registering more cases for surveys of mosques, dargahs and other disputed sites, and had prohibited trial court from passing interim or final orders in the pending Gyanvapi, Mathura Shah Idgah and Sambhal Jama Masjid cases. The constitutionality issue, as to whether Sections 2, 3 and 4 of the 1991 Act are still valid as per challenge raised in the light of Article 14, 25, 26 and 29 of the Constitution, is yet to be determined. Until then, Bhojshala verdict is in a truly uneasy legal limbo. The core of its argument is the belief that, while conversion is prohibited under the Act, determining religious character is not. It will now be up to the Supreme Court to determine whether the High Court interpreted that distinction correctly.

The petitioners' counter: Bhojshala is an ASI protected monument, it is not a "place of worship" as per Section 4 meaning it's not even covered by the freeze of the Act. Not so, according to the Muslim side. This will be decided in the Supreme Court, on appeal. The political elite are aware of this. So do all the plaintiffs in all cases like this throughout northern India.

An analyst's perspective

The tendency to see the Bhojshala verdict as a triumph or a violation is the wrong instinct. What it is, is the best put together judgment that's ever been produced on a class of cases in which the Indian state has been trying not to adjudicate for 80 years. The 98 days of the ASI survey, the 2000 page report, the formal process before the Supreme Court that allowed the survey to proceed under safeguards, the unbroken paper trail of inscriptions and gazettes that the bench had to move through, the recommendations to propose an alternative land for a new mosque, instead of a winner-takes-all order none of these are the hallmarks of a court that led the way in its evidence. These two are compared to the naked political claims made on both sides, and the imbalance is clear.

The stark reality neither side would say this on prime time is that the country now requires the Supreme Court to do what only it can. Either Section 4 of the Places of Worship Act is constitutional and stifles the ongoing debates in this manner, leaving Bhojshala as an insulated outlier where they can continue to use their carve-out for ASI-monuments, or it isn't, and the country enters a new era of religious-site litigation, with the Hindu side, having been at it for thirty-five years, structurally better equipped. In any case, the constitution bench verdict is more significant than Friday's Indore episode.

While there will be much sound and fury over the weekend, the one aspect of the Bhojshala bench that should be remembered despite the partisan dust-up is the procedural correctness. A longstanding grievance has been subject to a scientific survey of the times, both sides have had their say, and an alternative-land solution is now offered by the State with the assistance of the Muslim community, and an appeal to the apex court is available. That's pretty much the way things should be done in a constitutional democracy where there's a disputed sacred geography to deal with. What kind of country we choose to be in 2026 will be determined by whether the Supreme Court is able to uphold the 1991 Act, or rewrite it. The judgment in Dhar has merely opened the Pandora's box. The difficult reading is yet to be done.