GS-I: Legal Deities.

News

Among the parties in a famous temple suit appeals now being heard by the Supreme Court is the Lord represented by His “next friend”.

God as a juristic person:

• A juristic person, as opposed to a “natural person” (that is, a human being), is an entity whom the law vests with a personality.
• The Supreme Court has clarified this in the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee vs Som Nath Dass and Others (2000) order.
• It states that the very words Juristic Person connote recognition of an entity to be in law a person which otherwise it is not.
• In other words, it is not an individual natural person but an artificially created person which is to be recognised to be in law as such.

From when did this recognition begin?

• The treatment of deities as juristic persons started under the British.
• Temples owned huge land and resources, and British administrators held that the legal owner of the wealth was the deity, with a shebait or manager acting as trustee.
• In 1887, then Bombay HC held in the Dakor Temple case: “Hindu idol is a juridical subject and the pious idea that it embodies is given the status of a legal person.
• This was reinforced in the 1921 order in Vidya Varuthi Thirtha vs Balusami Ayyar, where the court said, “under the Hindu law, the image of a deity ‘juristic entity’, vested with the capacity of receiving gifts and holding property”.

God: Not always a legal person:

• A juristic entity or person is one in whom the law reposes rights or duties in its own name.
• A company is a juristic person, who can hold or deal with property in its own name.
• While God as an abstract concept is not a juristic entity, deities in Hindu law have been conferred personhood, as capable of being bestowed with property, or leading it out or suing to take back possession.
• Thus, by a legal fiction installed deities at Hindu places of worship have been treated like other real persons for the purpose of law
• However, not every deity is a legal person. This status is given to an idol only after its public consecration, or pran pratishtha.

Other than Hinduism:

• A mosque has never been held as a juristic person, because it’s a place where people gather to worship; it is not an object of worship itself. Neither has a church.
• In Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee vs Som Nath Dass and Others (2000), the SC ruled that the Guru Granth Sahib cannot be equated with other sacred books.
• Guru Granth Sahib is revered like a Guru and is the very heart and spirit of gurudwara.
• The reverence of Guru Granth on the one hand and other sacred books on the other hand is based on different conceptual faith, belief and application.
• However, the court clarified that “every Guru Granth Sahib cannot be a juristic person unless it takes juristic role through its installation in a gurudwara or at such other recognised public place.”

Who else holds such legal status?

• In May, the Punjab and Haryana High Court held that the “entire animal kingdom” has a “distinct legal persona with corresponding rights, duties, and liabilities of a living person”.
• On March 20, 2017, the Uttarakhand High Court declared that the Ganga and Yamuna would be legally treated as “living people,” and enjoy “all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person”.

GS-III: The current crisis at PMC Bank serves the country a warning.

News

The crisis unfolding at PMC Bank is the tip of the iceberg of larger, unresolved problems in India’s banking sector.

Roots of the cause:

• The roots of the crisis in the banking sector go back to the unresolved problem of non-performing assets (NPAs).
• These are magnified in the case of cooperative banks due to lax governance and a dicey business model.

Other problems with the cooperative sector:

• Bad loans and poor governance.
• The business model offers depositors high-interest rates and lends money to borrowers of dubious credentials at low interest.
• It can easily run into difficulty due to the resultant wafer-thin profit margins.
• Poor regulatory response – it has so far been symptomatic and shows little understanding of the underlying disease.

Way ahead for cooperative banks:

• Fundamentally reformed governance so that a crisis such as this one does not occur in the future.
• The long-run health of the banking sector requires short-run transitional costs. This dichotomy between long-run and short-run costs—is at the root of many deferred or unfinished reforms.
• Rationalizing taxes is a good start. But it cannot serve as a fix to the sort of problems that we are seeing at PMC Bank and other troubled banks.

Conclusion:

The fundamental political economy problem is that public sector banks serve multiple masters and, as a consequence, loan decisions are not always based on economic and financial logic.

GS-II: Seize the opening.

Context

The spokesperson for Iran’s nuclear agency announced that the country had the ability to enrich uranium up to 20% and it had launched advanced centrifuge machines.

Implications

This further violates its commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

It is also an escalation of the brinkmanship since US President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018.

JCPOA

• The 2015 JCPOA came into being after arduous negotiations.
• It placed restrictions on Iran’s nuclear programme and removed the harsh economic sanctions on the country.
• Since the US’s withdrawal from the deal, the Trump administration has ramped up the sanctions, and its anti-Iran rhetoric. Iran has flouted the limits placed on its nuclear programme.
• The US assumed that the sanctions would increase disaffection in Iran to such a degree that the government would be overthrown.
• The moderate, democratically-elected Rouhani government has suffered due to the sanctions. The nuclear deal was pushed despite the recalcitrant sections of the Islamic state as opposed to any accord with the US.

Indian role

• India has managed to walk the diplomatic tightrope between the US and Iran.
• India has a very close relationship with the US and also has close historical and trade ties with Iran.
• India could join Paris and other world powers in nudging both countries towards talks.

GS-III: Elephant Endotheliotropic Herpes-virus (EEHV)

News

A rare disease has killed five elephants in Odisha. The four deaths in Nandan Kanan Zoo are the first reported cases of EEHV-related deaths in an Indian zoo while the death in the forest too is the first known such case in the wild in India.

EEHV

• EEHV is a type of herpesvirus that can cause a highly fatal haemorrhagic disease in young Asian elephants.
• The disease is caused by a virus called EEHV, or elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus.
• EEHV is lethal for young elephants between the ages of one and 12.

Symptoms:

• Most elephants carry just as most humans carry a cold virus.
• When EEHV is triggered, the elephant dies of massive internal bleeding and symptoms which are hardly visible.
• Some elephants show symptoms such as reduced appetite, nasal discharge and swollen glands, researchers say.
• The disease is usually fatal, with a short course of 28-35 hours.

No cure yet:

• There is no true cure for herpes-viruses in animals or in humans because herpes viruses go latent.
• The disease has a short course which means that we have to take a very quick call on a suspected EEHV case and kick off treatment protocols.
• This treatment is a combination of anti-viral therapy, aggressive fluid therapy (to counter haemorrhaging), immuno-stimulant drugs (selenium and Vitamins C, E), anti-pyretics and analgesics (to bring down fever).

Why it is a concern?

• The death of the Chandaka forest elephant has worried officials in Odisha.
• If elephants in the wild start falling prey to the virus, then treatment will be very difficult.
• If a young elephant dies before reproducing, it affects the population of the species as a whole in the concerned geography.