A little after 11.45am on Monday, the Supreme Court ordered that the Varanasi District Court’s order on a survey of the Gyanvapi mosque by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) should not be enforced till 5pm on Wednesday.

The court passed the order while hearing a petition filed by the Anjuman Intezamia Masjid Committee (AIMC), which manages the Gyanvapi mosque.

By then, a team from ASI had been conducting the survey for almost five hours amid tight security in the presence of four Hindu women plaintiffs, their counsel and senior administrative officials in compliance with a Varanasi court order dated July 21. The mosque committee boycotted the ASI survey.

The team stopped work after the apex court halted the “detailed scientific survey” saying “some breathing time” needed to be granted to give the mosque committee time to appeal the district court’s order.

A team from ASI, along with plaintiffs, entered the Gyanvapi premises at 7am and started the survey. It measured some parts of the barricaded area of Gyanvapi mosque complex, photographed and captured on video, some other aspects, even collected soil samples. But according to Subhash Nandan Chaturvedi, a counsel for the plaintiffs, it stopped the survey soon after the Supreme Court’s order.

The ASI team comprised 43 members. The others present during the exercise included Hindu plaintiffs Rekha Pathak, Manjoo Vyas, Sita Sahoo and Laxmi Devi, their counsel Subhash Nandan Chaturvedi and Sudhir Tripathi, besides the UP government’s special counsel for Shringar Gauri-Gyanvapi case Rajesh Mishra.

Anjuman Intezamia Masjid Committee joint secretary SM Yasin said, “We have got temporary relief.” He added that he did not receive a copy of the Varanasi court’s order for the survey till Monday morning but that the ASI received it and started the survey in hurry.

On Friday, a Varanasi court ordered an extensive survey of the barricaded area of the Gyanvapi Masjid, excluding its sealed section, by ASI to ascertain whether the mosque was built over a pre-existing Hindu temple, holding that the scientific investigation is “necessary” for the “true facts” to come out. The court, however, ordered excluding the section which has remained sealed since the Supreme Court order in May 2022 from the survey. This is where the Hindu side claims a Shivling has been found; the Muslim side claims what has been found is part of a fountain.

Varanasi district magistrate S Rajlingam on Sunday said all the parties, including plaintiffs and defendants, related to the matter were informed about the survey.

Varanasi DM and the commissioner of police Ashok Mutha Jain held a meeting with the Hindu plaintiffs, their counsel, including Subhash Nandan Chaurvedi, Sudhir Tripathi and defendants AIMC joint secretary SM Yasin and their counsel on Sunday evening.

The Varanasi court’s order came on applications moved by four of the five Hindu plaintiffs who filed a suit in August 2021, demanding the right of unhindered worship at the Maa Shringar Gauri Sthal. Rekha Pathak, Manju Vyas, Sita Sahu, and Lakshmi Devi filed the application for the survey. Their pleas were argued by advocates Hari Shankar Jain, Vishnu Jain, Sudhir Tripathi and Subhash Nandan Chaturvedi.

The mosque management committee, in its reply, refuted that the mosque was built over a temple. Represented by advocates Ansari and Ekhlaq Ahmad, the management committee opposed the survey, saying such an exercise cannot be ordered to collect evidence. They also argued that a survey by an advocate commissioner was previously conducted in 2022 and until the validity of that survey was not decided, no new survey could be ordered.