Mapping and navigating ontologies in water governance: the case of the Ganges

ABSTRACT

The foregrounding of economic interests to the exclusion of broadly termed ‘cultural’ interests in water governance has been challenged by the grant of legal personality to rivers, including the Ganges. In this article, we explore the 2017 Ganges judgment of the High Court of Uttarakhand, which conferred legal personality on the river, as a case study which exemplifies the recognition and negotiation of different ontologies of water. We explore the judgment’s simultaneous mobilization of the Ganges as socio-economic resource, ecosystem and spiritual being. Our analysis engages with possible tensions between water ontologies, and we ask how ontological conjunctures may be foregrounded, and disjunctures navigated, in practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Water governance
• legal personality
• Ganges
• law
• ontology
• ontological turn

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. According to Seargeant (2010), drawing on Heidegger, pre-ontological assumptions are those which provide meaning structures within which entities in question are understood. They are both necessary and inevitable for making meaning.

2. The Indian central government’s power to direct states to take such actions derives from its constitutional powers. Under the Indian constitution (Constitution of India, 1949, ss. 12, 36, 48A), both the Union of India and the Indian states have a mandate to protect and improve the environment. The states have the power to make laws with respect to water in their territory (s. 246(3) and schedule 7, list II). However, the Union has the power to make laws with respect to the regulation and development of inter-state rivers (such as the Ganges) to the extent declared by Parliament by law to be expedient in the public interest (s. 246(1) and schedule 7, list I, para [56]).

3. The High Court of Uttarakhand later granted legal personality to the Gangotri and Yamunotri Glaciers, which form the headwaters of the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers (Lalit Miglani v. State of Uttarakhand & others (2017)). Although not the subject of this analysis, it is noteworthy that this case has not been appealed.

4. Astha or aastha can be translated into English as ‘faith’ or ‘belief’.

5. Eck (1996, p. 138) explains that Ganga is more than the goddess of a single river; she is ‘the archetype of sacred waters’.

6. Te Awa Tupua is an indivisible and living whole, comprising the Whanganui River from the mountains to the sea, incorporating all its physical and metaphysical elements (Te Awa Tupua Act 2017, s. 12).