Dakshineswar temple

Calcutta, Aug. 25: The high court yesterday kept the Dakshineswar temple out of the purview of the ongoing case on Rani Rashmoni’s landed property.

Justice S. Banerjee passed the order during the hearing of the case between Kushal Chowdhury and Shyamali Das, both descendants of Rashmoni, who founded the temple.

Das had moved the court alleging that Chowdhury and two other trustees of the temple were trying to grab Rashmoni’s landed property by filing “a fake certified copy of an order issued by the Alipore district judge’s court before the land tribunal”.

Advocate Bidyut Roy, representing Das, claimed before the court that an official of the land and land revenue department in Kasba had issued a circular on June 7, 2005, asking the state government and the municipalities concerned to record Das’s name on the list of owners of Rashmoni’s property in South and North 24-Parganas.

“Challenging the legality of the circular, Kushal Chowdhury and two other trustees had moved an appeal before the district judge’s court in Alipore,” Roy told the court.

Roy also claimed that in June, Chowdhury, during the hearing of another case before the land tribunal, had issued an allegedly fake certified copy of the order passed by the Alipore district judge staying the department’s circular.

Roy told the court that his client had obtained another copy of the Alipore court’s order and discovered that no such stay order had been passed.

On August 7, Justice Banerjee passed an interim order asking the registrar general of the high court to find out within four weeks what the actual order of the district judge was.

The court did not stop the authorities concerned from listing Das as one of the owners of Rashmoni’s properties.

Ahin Chowdhury, representing Kushal Chowdhury, requested Justice Banerjee to leave the temple out of the ambit of the order so that it could function without problems.