A River Tangled in Metaphor
March 2017, just days after the Whanganui river in New Zealand was given the status of a legal person by an Act of Parliament, the High Court of Uttarakhand in India ruled that the Ganga river and one of its tributaries, the Yamuna, were living entities, and accorded them the status of a legal person. Religious sentiments of Hindus, the dependence of almost half of India’s population on the river, and its present dire condition were cited as reasons for scaling up its legal status, and to enable greater protection.
Ten days later, the court took a judicial leap. It ruled to include ‘Himalayan mountain ranges, glaciers, rivers, streams, rivulets, lakes, jungles, air, forests, meadows, dales, wetlands, grasslands, and springs…’ as legal entities/ persons. Entities and objects such as religious idols, corporate bodies and financial trusts are routinely accorded legal personality and rights for procedural functions, such as being represented in courts, owning property and enforcing contracts. What was unprecedented was that the Ganga was personified as Ma or Mother to people in India and unequivocally given the legal status of a human being.
Taxonomically speaking, whether the status of an ape of the genus Homo, and just one of them, for an entire river system and all the life in it is truly an elevation, or just an Oedipal obsession, is a longer story. However, since a river is unable to ‘speak for itself’, the court nominated three government bureaucrats as loco parentis or local guardians; the chief secretary, the advocate general of the state, and the director of Namami Gange (a government project to clean the Ganga), to ensure protection of these rivers and represent them in court.
The two court verdicts make difficult reading. Apart from what the ‘Lordships have held as under’, the texts are rambling, repetitive and barely proof-read. They come across as hurried first drafts. Despite their untidy presentation, let us be clear: they are stunningly bold, pioneering first steps in a judicial realm that is still uncertain. And they have taken the bureaucracy by the…well, horns. They have, apart from recommending institutional frameworks and legislative reform, directed the government to take time-bound and serious action against offenders. Problem is, the offenders include industrial corporations, hydropower corporations and the builders’ nexus, ashrams and hotels, besides municipal corporations.
Not surprisingly, barely three months after these rulings, the government of Uttarakhand has challenged the court’s verdict in the Supreme Court, contending that the verdict is ‘unsustainable in the law’ and constitutes judicial overreach. They have asked to be relieved of the function of legal guardians of the river and have played on diversionary aspects that are sure to resonate with bureaucracy: uncertainty and financial liability. Their plea, for example, raises the scaremongering questions of whether, in the event of casualty during floods, the chief secretary, one of the loco parentis, could be sued for damages, and whether the state government would be financially liable, and would they have such resources.
What will come of this path-breaking verdict in the Supreme Court is uncertain right now. Have no doubt, the case will be sought to be further mired with other metaphors such as ‘Development’ for competing uses of water from our rivers, and ‘Renewable Energy’ for stealing of entire rivers for hydropower for the peaking hours of the ravenous metropolis.
Perhaps we need to reconcile our metaphors with our actions. Can we call the Ganga ‘Ma’, and the holiest of all rivers in India, and continue to contribute to over a billion gallons of shit, sewage and industrial poisons that are poured into it every day? And just because we have dressed up the Ganga with beautiful metaphors that are dominant today, does this concern not apply to every river in our subcontinent, with smaller but equally poetic metaphors of their own?