Some members of a trust have claimed that Mathura’s Sri Krishna Janmasthan Sewa Sangh, which controls the Krishna Janmasthan temple, comes under it and an agreement signed by the Sangh and the Shahi Masjid Idgah Committee in 1968 to coexist peacefully was null and void.

Vinod Kumar Bindal and Om Prakash Singhal, two members of the Sri Krishna Janmabhumi Trust, said in a fresh petition filed in the court of the civil judge (senior division) on Friday that the Sangh was “a body of the trust” and it was never allowed to sign any agreement with anybody.

The court referred the case to Allahabad High Court, recommending that it be clubbed with 17 other pending cases related to the Sri Krishna Janmasthan temple and the Shahi Masjid Idgah Committee.

“The Sangh and the idgah committee’s agreement of 1968 is invalid because the Sangh had no right to take any decision. The Sangh is a body of the trust and only the trust is authorised to take decisions,” the petitioners said.

A member of the Sangh, who didn’t want to be named, said: “The trust is a dubious body formed a few years ago to pollute the social harmony of the country with a political motive. The Sangh was formed before India got freedom and we had signed an agreement with the idgah committee 55 years ago because we didn’t want to fight with the other community over some 300-400-year-old controversy. We are not into correcting the past; we are for peace and harmony in the present and future.”

The mosque and the temple are adjacent to each other. Sangh members said that
the area straddles 13.37 acres, of which the temple covers about 10.8 acres and the mosque exists on 2.5 acres. The trust had earlier moved court claiming ownership of the entire land.

“Some other organisations had challenged the agreement of 1968 in court in the past and their pleas were rejected first in 1973 and then in 1974. The trust and some other groups had also filed cases in the past to claim that they were the rightful owners of the land of the Krishna Janmasthan temple, but it was rejected by the court. This time they have approached the court with a new claim that the Sangh belonged to the trust. We don’t know any such trust and have nothing to do with these baseless claims,” the Sangh member said.

All 18 cases filed by the Hindu petitioners claim that Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb had demolished a portion of the temple in the 17th century to build the mosque.

The trust claims that the mosque had come up at the very same place where Lord Krishna was born to Vasudeva and Devaki inside a prison where they had been kept by Kans.