NEW DELHI: God or ‘Supreme Being’ may be omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent but has no juristic personality, but an idol, worshipped by believers as a physical incarnation of God, is a juristic personality, the Supreme Court has said.

“Legal personality is not conferred on the Supreme Being. The Supreme Being has no physical presence for it is understood to be omnipresent — the very ground of being itself. The court does not confer legal personality on divinity,” ruled a bench of then CJI Ranjan Gogoi and Justices S A Bobde (now CJI), D Y Chandrachud, Ashok Bhushan and S Abdul Nazeer in its landmark judgment settling the 70-year-old Ayodhya land dispute.

“Divinity in Hindu philosophy is seamless, universal and infinite. Divinity pervades every aspect of the universe. The attributes of divinity defy description and furnish the fundamental basis for not defining it with reference to boundaries — physical or legal. For this reason that it is omnipresent, it would be impossible to distinguish where one legal entity ends and the next begins,” the bench said.

The SC said in contrast, an idol was identifiable by its physical form and hence could have juristic personality. “The idea of a legal person is premised on the need to ‘identify the subjects’ of the legal system. An omnipresent (God or Supreme Being) being is incapable of being identified or delineated in any manner meaningful to the law and no identifiable legal subject could emerge,” it added.

The bench further explained the legal difficulty in conferring legal personality on God as “the narrow confines of the law is ill suited to engage in such an exercise (delineating boundaries of a God who is omnipresent) and it is for this reason that the law has steered clear from adopting the approach”.

“In Hinduism , physical manifestation of the Supreme Being exists in the form of idols to allow worshippers to experience a shapeless being. The idol is the representation of the Supreme Being. The idol, by possessing physical form, is identifiable,” it said.

The SC said the Hindu practice of dedicating properties to temples and idols had to be adjudicated upon by courts for the first time in the late 19th century. “The doctrine that Hindu idols possess a distinct legal personality was adopted by English judges in India faced with the task of applying Hindu law to religious endowments,” it said.

“To provide courts with a conceptual framework within which they could analyse and practically adjudicate upon disputes involving competing claims over endowed properties, courts recognised legal personality of the Hindu idol. It was a legal innovation necessitated by historical circumstances, the gap in the existing law and by considering convenience,” the SC said.

