Juristic Personhood and Property: Some Reflections on the Juridical Path of the Idol in India

This article tries to understand the role of the idol as a juristic person in the Ram Janmabhumi judgment that resolved the issue of title, following from the Ayodhya dispute. I trace the link between the establishment of the idol as a juristic being and the governance of Hindu property, highlighting the point that an award of personhood to the idol is an award of rights to the community behind the idol. The details of the Ram Janmabhumi judgment show that juridically empowering the community behind the idol in an inter-community conflict has a different texture from an intra-community dispute. The implications of this are explored—first by understanding the nature of the rights created and the conflicts they generate (following the Italian jurist Sforza), and second by understanding this configuration of property rights as a positional good, positional goods being paramount in the production of an economy geared to ethno-nationalism.