NEW DELHI, 14 September 2005 — Municipal authorities used bulldozers yesterday to clear illegal shops from around the 17th-century Jama Masjid following a court ruling upholding efforts to protect the historic structure dominating the old city of India’s capital.
The bulldozers were slated to flatten some 320 food stalls, small shops and shanties illegally erected around the perimeter of India’s largest mosque in recent decades.
Shopkeepers had been ordered to clear out from the area following a Delhi High Court ruling in favor of a petition by a nongovernmental organization, arguing that India’s largest mosque was being stifled by the mushrooming illegal buildings.
Completed in 1658, Jama Masjid’s soaring minarets and onion domes tower over what once was the elegant heart of the Mogul Empire but today is the rundown, congested old quarter of Delhi. The court ordered all illegal structures to be removed by Sept. 15. “We have our orders and we are going ahead with the demolitions,” said New Delhi’s municipal commissioner, Rakesh Mehta.
