Dharmaśāstra and the legal personality of deities in the Ayodhya verdicts (2010 & 2019)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores how Hindu deities and places of worship are understood as legal persons in the Supreme Court of India’s (2019) and the Allahabad High Court’s (2014) verdicts concerning the ‘Ayodhya Dispute’ – M. Siddiq v. Suresh Das. It discusses the Courts’ interpretations of a specific Sanskrit maxim attributed to the sixteenth Century Sanskrit jurist, Raghunandana Bhaṭṭācārya, in the specific context of their distinction between the juridical personality of the deities Rām Lalla Virajman (the infant form of Rāma worshipped at the Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhumi site) and Asthan Rām Janmabhūmi (the deification of contested site itself). The Allahabad High Court invoked Raghunandana to justify a faith-based application of Sanskrit jurisprudence (Dharmaśāstra) to expand the Hindu community’s constitutionally-protected rights to freedom of religion into a legal weapon with which to assert control over India’s contested geography. The Supreme Court, however, rejected this majoritarian ‘Trojan Horse’ by reframing Raghunandana’s maxim – as cited in a body of judicial precedent – to support the legal personality of Rām Virajman merely as the pious purpose of worship at Ayodhya. Legal debates about the juristic personality of Hindu deities are inseparable, I argue, from determinations about the ownership of some hotly-contested religious sites in India.