Former Supreme Court judge Justice Rohinton Nariman described the Ayodhya judgment as a setback to secularism but highlighted a silver lining in the five pages of the verdict that upheld the Places of Worship Act, 1991, during his remarks on Thursday.

Justice Nariman further emphasized that the five pages of the Constitution Bench's judgment in the Ayodhya dispute serve as a response to the ongoing litigations across the country seeking surveys of mosques alleged to have been constructed over temples in the past.

"And this very Constitution Bench spends five pages on it and says that it is sound in secularism, which is part of the basic structure that you cannot look backwards, you have to look forwards," he stated.

Justice Nariman stressed that those five pages from the Constitution Bench's Ayodhya judgment should be read aloud in every District Court and High Court across the country to deter further claims against various religious structures. 

Since 2019, numerous cases, primarily in northern India, have been filed in civil courts seeking the "restoration" of temples allegedly destroyed to construct mosques. One such recent case involves the Sambhal Jamia Masjid, where a civil court ordered a survey based on claims that the mosque was built over a temple.  

Notably, the Places of Worship Act, 1991, which prohibits the conversion of any place of worship as it existed on August 15, 1947, is currently under challenge in the Supreme Court. In its landmark 2019 verdict on the Ayodhya dispute, the Court had lauded this legislation as a critical safeguard for secularism.

"In providing a guarantee for the preservation of the religious character of places of public worship as they existed on 15 August 1947 and against the conversion of places of public worship, Parliament determined that independence from colonial rule furnishes a constitutional basis for healing the injustices of the past by providing the confidence to every religious community that their places of worship will be preserved and that their character will not be altered," the Constitution Bench had said.

"The Places of Worship Act imposes a non-derogable obligation towards enforcing our commitment to secularism under the Indian Constitution. The law is hence a legislative instrument designed to protect the secular features of the Indian polity, which is one of the basic features of the Constitution. Non-retrogression is a foundational feature of the fundamental constitutional principles of which secularism is a core component. The Places of Worship Act is thus a legislative intervention which preserves non-retrogression as an essential feature of our secular values," the top court had said in the Ayodhya verdict.