Jan. 16, Mumbai (Reuters) - Days before the inauguration of another significant temple, constructed on the site of a demolished mosque, the Supreme Court of India on Tuesday put an end to plans for an examination of a centuries-old mosque to find out if it included Hindu relics and symbols.

During his campaign to win a third term in the general elections that are scheduled for May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will preside over an event on Monday that is centered around a temple in the town of Ayodhya devoted to Lord Ram, a god revered by millions of Hindus.

According to news agency ANI, in which Reuters has a minority interest, the Supreme Court halted a lower court judgment permitting the formation of a commission to assess the Shahi Eidgah mosque in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh's Mathura.

According to the Bar and Bench news website, the application submitted for the appointment of the local commission was extremely ambiguous, according to its panel of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta.

The 17th-century mosque, where Muslims still pray, was opened for inspection by the state's Allahabad high court last December in order to look for any artifacts or Hindu emblems within the compound.

Hardline Hindu factions associated with Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) maintain that throughout several centuries, Islamic conquerors and rulers demolished Hindu temples.

In order to ascertain whether the centuries-old Gyanvyapi mosque in Varanasi, Modi's constituency, was constructed on a Hindu temple, a similar survey was permitted by another court last year.

In 1992, a Hindu mob destroyed a mosque on the site of Ayodhya, which they claimed was the birthplace of Lord Ram. The mob claimed there had formerly been a temple there. This sparked nationwide riots that claimed 2,000 lives, the most of them were Muslims of minority.

The site was given to Hindus by the Supreme Court in 2019, and work on the temple started in 2020.

(This story has been updated to make clear that, as stated in paragraph 3, Reuters has a minority interest in ANI, not the majority.)