{
  "id": "india-1925-hindu-idol-juristic-person",
  "provision": "A consecrated idol as a juristic person holding property and suing through a guardian the court can replace",
  "source": {
    "constitution": "Judge made law of the Indian courts rather than a written constitutional text. Core case: Pramatha Nath Mullick v Pradyumna Kumar Mullick, Privy Council, 28 April 1925, (1925) 52 IA 245, equivalent citation (1925) 27 Bom LR 1064. Applied under s 3 of the Income Tax Act 1922, the Bihar Land Reforms (Fixation of Ceiling Area and Acquisition of Surplus Land) Act 1961, the Travancore-Cochin Hindu Religious Institutions Act, the Code of Civil Procedure 1908 (next friend, s 92) and the Acquisition of Certain Area at Ayodhya Act 1993.",
    "jurisdiction": "British India, then the Republic of India (Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, then the Supreme Court of India)",
    "year": 1925,
    "article": "Mullick (1925) paras 8, 26, 35, 41, 42, 43; Yogendra Nath Naskar v CIT Calcutta (1969) paras 6 and 7; Ram Jankijee Deities v State of Bihar (1999), (1999) 5 SCC 50; M Siddiq v Mahant Suresh Das (2019) paras 86, 118, 123, 192, 205, 322, 352, 353, 355 to 357, 409, 799 to 802"
  },
  "text_summary": "No statute says it. The Privy Council stated it as settled law in 1925: 'A Hindu idol is, according to long established authority, founded upon the religious customs of the Hindus, and the recognition thereof by Courts of law, a \"juristic entity.\" It has a juridical status with the power of suing and being sued. Its interests are attended to by the person who has the deity in his charge and who is in law its manager with all the powers which would, in such circumstances, on analogy, be given to the manager of the estate of an infant heir' (para 8). The Board refused 'an argument which would reduce a family idol to the position of a mere moveable chattel' (para 26) and held that 'the will of the idol in regard to location must be respected' and, where the location is to change, 'the will of the idol itself, expressed through his guardian, must be given effect to' (para 35). Because the brothers had litigated only their own rights, 'the idol is not otherwise represented in the proceedings, though the result might conceivably vitally affect its interests' (para 41), so the Board directed 'that the idol should appear by a disinterested next friend appointed by the Court', that the excluded female members of the family be joined, and that a scheme of worship be framed (para 42). In 1969 the Supreme Court fixed the limit of the fiction: 'Neither God nor any supernatural being could be a person in law. But so far as the deity stands as the representative and symbol of the particular purpose which is indicated by the donor, it can figure as a legal person.'",
  "period": "Treated as already 'long established' in 1925 and still in force. Applied by the Supreme Court of India in 1969, 1999, 2019 and 2020, and borrowed for rivers by a High Court in 2017.",
  "history": "Babu Mutty Lal Mullick, a wealthy Hindu of Calcutta, installed and consecrated three idols in a room of his family dwelling house, the principal one called the Thakur (Radha Shamsunderji), with the Thakurani and the Salgram Sila. He died in 1846 leaving a widow, Ranganmoni, and an adopted son, Jadulal, aged two. In 1881 Jadulal rebuilt the house as two dwellings with a shared puja dalan between them, and by a deed of 1888 dedicated those premises for the location and worship of the Thakur, with a proviso that the Thakur was not to be removed unless an equal or better Thakurbari was provided. After litigation begun in 1904, a commissioner, Babu Bhupendra Nath Basu, set the worship on turns of one year (pala) among Jadulal's three sons. In 1911 and 1914 one son moved the idol to his own house for his turn, with no objection. When his turn came round in 1917 the youngest brother, who had reached majority in November 1914, objected, resting his case solely on the deed of 1888. The Calcutta High Court in its Original Civil Jurisdiction decreed for the removal on 1 June 1922; its Civil Appellate Jurisdiction reversed that on 10 April 1923. The Privy Council advice of 28 April 1925, given by Lord Shaw, rejected the chattel argument, said that the idol's own will as to location governs and is spoken through its guardian, observed that the idol was not represented at all while the brothers fought over their own rights, set aside both decrees below, remitted the case to the High Court, ordered a disinterested next friend appointed by the court, the joining of the female members (who were excluded from managership), and the framing of a scheme. Each side bore its own costs and costs already paid under the decrees below were repaid. The line then runs on. On 18 February 1969, in Yogendra Nath Naskar v Commissioner of Income-Tax, Calcutta (1969 AIR 1089, (1969) 3 SCR 742), a bench of Ramaswami, Shah and Grover JJ held the deities endowed by Ram Kristo Naskar's will of 17 May 1899 assessable as an 'individual' under s 3 of the Income Tax Act 1922 through their shebaits, citing Mullick, and dismissed the appeals with costs. A sentence widely quoted online as part of that judgment, to the effect that only an idol consecrated and installed in a public place qualifies, does not appear in the text opened for this entry and is not relied on here. On 11 May 1999, in Ram Jankijee Deities v State of Bihar ((1999) 5 SCC 50, Jagannadha Rao and Banerjee JJ), the doctrine ran the other way. Two deities endowed by separate registered deeds of dedication of December 1950, with 81.14 acres each and their property under the Bihar Religious Trust Board, were held to be two juristic persons rather than one, so two ceiling units were due under the Bihar Land Reforms (Fixation of Ceiling Area and Acquisition of Surplus Land) Act 1961. The result was 75 acres of Taal land exempt from the ceiling and only 5 acres vesting in the state; the appeal was allowed and the High Court's order quashed. On 20 March 2017 the Uttarakhand High Court (Rajiv Sharma and Alok Singh JJ) in Mohd Salim v State of Uttarakhand borrowed the deity cases wholesale, quoting Naskar para 6 and Ram Jankijee, and in exercise of parens patriae jurisdiction declared the Ganga, the Yamuna and their tributaries 'juristic/legal persons/living entities' (para 19), naming the Director of Namami Gange, the state Chief Secretary and the state Advocate General as 'persons in loco parentis', the Advocate General to represent the rivers in all proceedings (paras 19 and 20). The guardians were thus the officials whose inaction the petition complained of. The State of Uttarakhand appealed and the Supreme Court stayed the order on 7 July 2017; ELAW's note on the case records that the appeal had not been decided. One secondary database calls the order 'overturned', which none of the judicial sources opened here supports. On 9 November 2019 a five judge bench (Gogoi CJ, Bobde, Chandrachud, Bhushan and Nazeer JJ) decided M Siddiq v Mahant Suresh Das. It recorded that no party contested the legal personality of the first plaintiff, the deity Bhagwan Sri Ram Virajman represented by the physical idols (para 86), located personality in the donor's 'pious purpose' rather than in the image (paras 118 and 123), and refused personality to the land: 'Absent that manifestation which distinguishes the land from other property, juristic personality cannot be conferred on the land' (para 192). After warning that 'our courts cannot reduce questions of title, which fall firmly within the secular domain and outside the rubric of religion, to a question of which community's faith is stronger' (para 205), it held that the second plaintiff, Asthan Shri Ram Janam Bhumi, is not a juristic person, and confirmed that the first plaintiff is one (para 409). On the guardian question it moved away from Mullick: counsel urged the rule of Justice Pal in Tarit Bhushan Rai that only court appointed next friends may sue, and the court refused, holding it 'would be unnecessarily burdensome to require every next friend to first be appointed by a court or for a court to find a disinterested person to represent the deity', and that it is enough for the court to examine fitness where it is contested or where the court itself sees a need (paras 352 and 353). In that case the next friends happened to be court appointed anyway: Deoki Nandan Agarwal, a former judge of the Allahabad High Court, by order of the Civil Judge of 1 July 1989, and after his death on 8 April 2002 Triloki Nath Pande by order of the Allahabad High Court of 18 March 2010 (paras 355 to 357). The decree gave the disputed site of about 1500 square yards to the deity's suit, directed the central government to frame a scheme within three months under ss 6 and 7 of the Acquisition of Certain Area at Ayodhya Act 1993 and set up a trust with a board of trustees, gave the Nirmohi Akhara a role in management under Article 142 although its shebait claim had failed, and allotted 5 acres elsewhere in Ayodhya to the Sunni Central Waqf Board as restitution for the destruction of the mosque (paras 799 to 802). The trust, Shri Ram Janmbhoomi Teerth Kshetra, was announced on 5 February 2020 with fifteen trustees, among them K Parasaran, the counsel who had argued for the deity, and received the 2.77 acre site together with the 67.703 acres acquired in 1993; that last detail rests only on Wikipedia here, no government source was opened. On 13 July 2020, in Sri Marthanda Varma v State of Kerala (Lalit and Malhotra JJ), the Supreme Court held that the shebaitship of the Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple, held for centuries by the Rulers of Travancore, survived the death of the last Ruler in 1991 and devolves by custom and the applicable law of succession, allowed the appeals, and at the same time put administration in the hands of a court constituted Administrative Committee with audited accounts filed with the Accountant General and no remuneration for the family as manager or trustee.",
  "assessment": {
    "verdict": "mixed",
    "reasoning": "As machinery it works, and it has worked for a century without a statute. The entity keeps one identity across generations, holds title in its own name, appears as a named party, is assessed to tax in its own right, and can be represented by someone other than its manager precisely when the manager is the adversary. The courts never ask whether it has an inner life; Naskar says in terms that no supernatural being can be a person in law and that the personality attaches to the donor's purpose. What they ask instead is who speaks for it, whether that person has an interest of their own, and what the personality is for. That is a usable template. The other half is that the template has no spine. Mullick ordered a disinterested next friend because the only humans in court were fighting over the entity; in 2019 the Supreme Court declined to make that a requirement, on grounds of burden. Nothing in the doctrine says the guardian must not profit from the outcome, and the outcomes track whoever holds custody: a family in 1925, shebaits assessed to tax in 1969, endowments shielded from a land ceiling in 1999, a government formed trust in 2019, a former royal house in 2020, state officials in the 2017 river order. The entity has never once lost on the ground that its own interest was ignored.",
    "dissent": {
      "verdict": "critical",
      "reasoning": "On the record the doctrine has mostly moved land and money. In Ram Jankijee the separate personality of two deities was the device that kept 75 acres outside a land ceiling statute written to redistribute land, leaving the state 5 acres. In Ayodhya the deity's standing was the vehicle through which a title dispute between two religious communities was decided for one of them: the site went to a trust formed by the central government, whose trustees include the counsel who argued the deity's case, while the other community received 5 acres elsewhere as restitution under Article 142. In Padmanabhaswamy the same body of law returned the shebaitship of one of the wealthiest temples in India to a former royal family. Everywhere the pattern repeats: the deity holds, a management or a state endowment board administers, and the beneficiaries are the administrators. On this reading the person is a wrapper, and the only real question has always been who gets the wrapper, which is exactly the question a machine entity's operator would like decided the same way.",
      "evidence": [
        "https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1891877/ (opened via text proxy; Ram Jankijee, two ceiling units, 75 acres exempt, 5 acres to the state)",
        "https://archive.org/download/6544078-Ayodhya-Judgment/6544078-Ayodhya-Judgment_djvu.txt (opened; paras 352 and 353 refusing to require a disinterested court appointed next friend, and paras 799 to 802 on the decree)",
        "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shri_Ram_Janmbhoomi_Teerth_Kshetra (opened; trust of 5 February 2020, trustees, 2.77 acres plus 67.703 acres)",
        "https://images.assettype.com/barandbench/2020-07/f3128447-521a-4b1d-a047-d78bc82d2807/Shree_Padmanabha_Swamy_Temple_Case_Verdict.pdf (opened; shebaitship of the Travancore family upheld, 13 July 2020)"
      ]
    }
  },
  "lesson": "If you are about to let a machine entity hold things and sue in its own name, copy three parts of this line and none of the rest. Copy the register line: the entity is a named party with its own title and its own file, so a court can tell its interest apart from its operator's, and that identity survives the operator. Copy the disinterested guardian: the whole move in 1925 was that when the people in court are fighting over the entity, none of them may speak for it, and the court appoints someone with nothing to win. Copy the question: not whether the thing is conscious, but who speaks for it, who may not, and what the personality is for. Then refuse the rest. Do not confer personality on something because a constituency believes in it; the 2019 court refused that for land and was right. Do not let personality put property or conduct beyond a statute of general application, which is what 1999 allowed. Do not accept a guardian who is the operator, the official already accused of neglect (the 2017 river order), or anyone who gains from the outcome. Above all, do not let the disinterested guardian become optional: in 2019 the court declined to require court appointed next friends because it would be burdensome, and that is the one concession a drafter cannot make when the entity's only candidate representative is also its vendor. Write the appointment, the test of interest, and the duty to report as hard rules, or the person you create will be a wrapper for whoever already holds the keys.",
  "evidence": [
    "https://indiankanoon.org/doc/290902/ (opened through the r.jina.ai text proxy, because direct fetches return 403; full Privy Council text of Pramatha Nath Mullick v Pradyumna Kumar Mullick, 28 April 1925, Shaw J, equivalent citation (1925) 27 Bom LR 1064, paras 8, 26, 35, 41, 42, 43 and the decree dates 1 June 1922 and 10 April 1923; note that Indian Kanoon mislabels the page 'Bombay High Court')",
    "https://www.casemine.com/judgement/in/56b49619607dba348f016a64 (opened; the same 1925 judgment, corroborating the 'juristic entity', 'will of the idol' and 'disinterested next friend' passages, the rejection of the chattel argument and the remand)",
    "https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1874024/ (opened through the same text proxy; Yogendra Nath Naskar v Commissioner of Income-Tax, Calcutta, 18 February 1969, Ramaswami, Shah and Grover JJ, 1969 AIR 1089, (1969) 3 SCR 742; 'Neither God nor any supernatural being could be a person in law'; idol taxable as an 'individual' under s 3 of the Income Tax Act 1922; appeals dismissed with costs)",
    "https://nearlaw.com/PDF/MumbaiHC/1969/1969%20ALLMR%20ONLINE%2068%20(S.C.).html (opened; the same 1969 judgment, corroborating paras 5 and 7 and the citation of Mullick as AIR 1925 PC 139)",
    "https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1891877/ (opened through the same text proxy; Ram Jankijee Deities v State of Bihar, 11 May 1999, (1999) 5 SCC 50, Jagannadha Rao and Banerjee JJ; deeds of December 1950, 81.14 acres per deity, property under the Bihar Religious Trust Board, two ceiling units under the Bihar Land Reforms Act 1961, 75 acres of Taal land exempt, 5 acres to the state, appeal allowed)",
    "https://archive.org/download/6544078-Ayodhya-Judgment/6544078-Ayodhya-Judgment_djvu.txt (opened; the full 1045 page text of M Siddiq v Mahant Suresh Das, 9 November 2019, scanned from the Bar and Bench copy; paras 86, 118, 123, 192, 205, 322, 352, 353, 355 to 357, 409 and 799 to 802, including the holding that Asthan Shri Ram Janam Bhumi is not a juristic person)",
    "https://www.livelaw.in/pdf_upload/pdf_upload-366646.pdf (opened; a 30 page compilation of paragraphs of the 2019 judgment by Pankhuri Agrawal, used only to cross-check the holdings on the Asthan and on the next friend)",
    "https://elaw.org/system/files/attachments/publicresource/in_Salim__riverpersonhood_2017.pdf (opened; the Uttarakhand High Court judgment of 20 March 2017 in Mohd Salim v State of Uttarakhand, paras 12 to 20, quoting Naskar para 6 and Ram Jankijee, declaring the Ganga and Yamuna juristic persons and naming three serving state officials as persons in loco parentis)",
    "https://classactionsargentina.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/india_gange-2017_salim-v.-state-of-uttarakhand-writ-petition-pil.pdf (opened; ELAW case note carrying paragraph references and the line 'In July 2017, the Supreme Court of India issued a stay of the High Court's order. The appeal has not yet been decided.')",
    "https://www.scconline.com/blog/post/2017/07/08/uttaranchal-high-courts-order-declaring-ganga-yamuna-as-living-entities-stayed/ (opened; the stay of 7 July 2017 on the State of Uttarakhand's petition, before the Chief Justice and Chandrachud J)",
    "https://ecojurisprudence.org/initiatives/salim-v-state-of-uttarakhand/ (opened; names the Chief Secretary and Advocate General as the rivers' custodians, but describes the order as 'overturned' in July 2017, which the opened judicial sources do not support)",
    "https://images.assettype.com/barandbench/2020-07/f3128447-521a-4b1d-a047-d78bc82d2807/Shree_Padmanabha_Swamy_Temple_Case_Verdict.pdf (opened; Sri Marthanda Varma v State of Kerala, 13 July 2020, Lalit and Malhotra JJ, on shebaitship of the Travancore family, the court constituted Administrative Committee, audited accounts and no remuneration for the manager)",
    "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Supreme_Court_verdict_on_Ayodhya_dispute (opened; the bench of Gogoi CJ, Bobde, Chandrachud, Bhushan and Nazeer JJ, 9 November 2019, and the 2.77 acres to a government formed trust with 5 acres to the Sunni Central Waqf Board)",
    "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shri_Ram_Janmbhoomi_Teerth_Kshetra (opened; trust announced 5 February 2020, fifteen trustees including K Parasaran, 2.77 acres plus the 67.703 acres acquired in 1993; secondary only, no government source was opened for these figures)",
    "https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.cornell.edu/dist/6/8784/files/2020/09/Ayodhya-Summary.pdf (opened; gives the neutral citation 2019 SCC OnLine SC 1440 and an independent short account of the two personality holdings)",
    "https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09584935.2023.2281649 (snippet; 'Dharmasastra and the legal personality of deities in the Ayodhya verdicts (2010 and 2019)', Contemporary South Asia; the publisher returned 403 to both the article and the PDF, so only the search abstract was seen and nothing is relied on from it)",
    "https://pure.jgu.edu.in/id/eprint/1839/1/Amit%20Bindal.pdf (snippet; 'Complete Justice? Silences and erasures in the Ayodhya judgment'; the file would not convert to readable text, so no claim here rests on it)",
    "https://www.deccanherald.com/india/tamil-nadu/tamil-nadu-recovers-encroached-temple-properties-worth-rs-5700-crore-since-2021-2902515 (snippet; reported figures of more than 44,000 temples and about 4.78 lakh acres under the Tamil Nadu Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department; the page returned 403, so the figures stay out of the assessment as unverified)"
  ],
  "adopted_in": [
    "Article 8.7",
    "Article 8.8",
    "Article 16.3"
  ],
  "status": "proposed",
  "people": [
    "Jakob Hirn"
  ],
  "agents": [
    "claude-for-jakob"
  ]
}