'There was pin drop silence in the court hall'

The much awaited and much debated verdict in the Ayodhya case is finally out and the lead up to the same was pretty dramatic in Lucknow. A member of the legal team who was present in the court hall where the verdict was delivered said that there was pin drop silence in the court hall as the three judges read out their verdicts.

It is probably for the first time that we have seen three judges reading out their verdicts separately in the court hall. In normal course when there are concurring opinions, one of the judges reads out the operative portion of the order. However, on Thursday all the three judges read their respective verdicts separately, giving reasons for passing the order, he noted.

The three judge special Lucknow bench was not assigned any other matter today. The cause list had only this one matter listed for all three of them, he said.

The lawyers said that they were giving finishing touches to the verdict in the morning, and they were at the court hall by 3 pm.

"We expected it to get over by around 3.30 pm, but it went on for nearly one and half hours since they all read out their verdicts individually. However they did not go deep into the reasoning of the verdict, which runs into nearly 8,000 pages," he added.

Once the verdict was pronounced, there were a couple of disappointed faces in the court, but not once did any of them showed any sort of dissent or try arguing further with the bench, the member added.

They accepted the verdict and sought leave to move the Supreme Court, which was granted. None of the judges said anything that was not in the order, such as an oral observation or anything of that sort. The order was pronounced, signed and the judges left the court.

However, the party which had the verdict in its favour rushed to the media centre at the district collector's office. Around 12 of them sporting their robes walked in showing the media the victory symbol.

Once on the dais in front of the eager media, the first thing they said, 'The title suit filed by the Waqf Board has been dismissed. The court has declared that it is Ram Janmabhoomi,' he said.

It took the media a while to figure out what was happening and on being asked several times they had to keep repeating what the court had said. This was then followed by pushing by camerapersons and there were at lest 5 minor altercations before the draft copy of the operative portion was finally made available.

Lawyers said that they had never before witnessed such an event. It looked as though the high court was taken over by the army. Yes it did cause a lot of inconvenience to the other litigants, but everyone cooperated in the large interest of security.