'No Lord will be happy to see their children suffer': Gujarat High Court

After an entire day of suspense on whether the Gujarat High Court will allow the Rath yatra to be organised in the state or not, at 2:00 am the High Court hearing concluded with rejecting all applications that challenged the stay on Rath Yatra. Which essentially means, there will be no rath yatra this year in the city of Ahmedabad. 

The court also noted that there can be no comparison between the city of Puri and Ahmedabad. That, the number of cases in Puri are significantly lesser than that of Ahmedabad. And on that, the order of Supreme Court regarding the Puri Rath Yatra was not treated as the only grounds for granting or rejecting the Rath Yatra to be organised.

Several other applications were made seeking permissions for Rath Yatra in several parts of the state like in Patan, Rajkot, etc. But the court was strict in stating that organising Rath Yatra anywhere except Ahmedabad was out of the question. 

'No God would be happy'

Interestingly, there were applicants who brought in the matter of faith and were met with an instant reaction from the bench who stated that, no God would be happy to see their followers suffer and that 'faith in God should not be that fragile that it dwindles if one year Rath Yatra is not carried out.'

"It is laudable, what the court has stated and that it has rejected the applications challenging the stay on Yatra being carried out in Ahmedabad. It restores our faith in Judiciary and it should also instigate more faith in these religious festivals and direct us to appreciate and celebrate these festivals in their true essence," said Aum Kotwal, the lawyer for the petitioner. 

There were several points made by the legal teams of the all the applications and especially the Advocate General who stated that the procession will be carried out with a minimum number of people and that instead of people, Raths will be pulled on tractors. That, there would have been only 37 people at the maximum in the entire procession.