Abstract
Designating rights for nature is a potentially powerful way to open up the dialogue on nature conservation around the world and provide enforcement power for an ecocentric approach. Experiments using a rights-based framework have combined in-country perspectives, worldviews, and practices with legal justifications giving rights to nature. This paper looks at a fusion of legal traditions, religious worldviews, and practices of environmental protection and advocacy in the context of India. It takes two specific legal cases in India and examines the recent high-profile rulings designating the rivers Ganga, Yamuna, and their tributaries and glaciers as juristic persons. Although the rulings were stayed a few months after their issuance, they are an interesting bending of the boundaries of nature, person, and deity that produce Ganga and Yamuna as vulnerable prototypes. This paper uses interview data focusing on these cases and document and archival data to ask whether legal interventions giving rights to nature can become effective avenues for environmental activism and spiritual ecology. The paper also assesses whether these legal cases have promoted Hindu nationalism or ‘Hindutva lite’.
Highlights
Designating rights for nature is a potentially powerful way to open up the dialogue on nature conservation around the world and provide some enforcement power for an ecocentric or nonhuman approach
This paper looks at such a fusion of legal traditions, religious worldviews, and practices of environmental protection and advocacy within India
On 20 March 2017, the High Court of Uttarakhand ruled that, “The Rivers Ganga and Yamuna, all their tributaries, streams, every natural water flowing with flow continuously or intermittently of these rivers, are declared as juristic/legal persons/living entities having the status of a legal person with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person in order to preserve and conserve river Ganga and Yamuna.”14 The landmark ruling was inspired by the case of the Whanganui river in
Summary
Designating rights for nature is a potentially powerful way to open up the dialogue on nature conservation around the world and provide some enforcement power for an ecocentric or nonhuman approach. This paper looks at such a fusion of legal traditions, religious worldviews, and practices of environmental protection and advocacy within India It takes two specific cases and examines the recent high-profile rulings designating the rivers Ganga, Yamuna, and their tributaries and glaciers as juristic persons. These cases represent an earnest attempt by petitioners, advocates, and judges to enforce river and broader resource conservation by creatively combining religious and legal concepts of deity and person with a rights of nature approach.. This overview provides background for a discussion of the nuances in individual motivations for the rights of nature approach in the two Indian cases on rivers While describing these motivations and other responses to the rulings, the paper offers an assessment of whether Hindu nationalism or Hindutva emerges in full-fledged or lite form through this advocacy for rights of sacred nature. It investigates whether these legal interventions helped devotees in cleanup or advocacy related to sacred rivers or whether the rulings drew the support of well-known advocates for river conservation.
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