Ground water is no private asset to be exploited limitlessly by any individual or corporation. It is cosmic wealth to be preserved in trust beyond the power of the state to barter away.
EVERY Indian, including every inhabitant of Perumatti panchayat in Kerala's Palakkad district, has a constitutionally guaranteed right to life, which is the foremost fundamental right. Here is a wake-up call for judges sounded by a great United States Judge:
"A judge should be compounded of the faculties that are demanded of the historian and the philosopher and the prophet. The last demand upon him - to make some forecast of the consequences of his action - is perhaps the heaviest. To pierce the curtain of the future, to give shape and visage to mysteries still in the womb of time, is the gift of the imagination. It requires poetic sensibilities with which judges are rarely endowed and which their education does not normally develop. These judges must have something of the creative artist in them; they must have antennae registering feeling and judgment beyond logical, let alone quantitative, proof" (Felix Frankfurter).
"Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps" (Thomas Jefferson).
"We need judges who are trained for the job, whose conduct can be freely criticised and is subject to investigation by a Judicial Performance Commission; judges who abandon wigs, gowns, and unnecessary linguistic legalisms; judges who welcome rather than shun publicity for their activities" (David Pannick QC).
Humanism and compassion are fundamental duties that are non-negotiable since Part IV-A of the Constitution articulates it with authority. Obviously, judges, executive functionaries and social activists are expected to use their power, imagination and influence to enable people, rich and poor, to enjoy their right to air and water and other biosphere- stratosphere-linked amenities and privileges, which are components of life and liberty under Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution, read together with Articles 39, 49A and 51 A as an integral human rights project operated in holistic harmony. What is often missed, but is constitutionally crucial, is that this ownership and control of the material resources of the community are, as a top priority, so distributed as to subserve the common good (Article 39-b). Equally fundamental in the governance of the country is that the state shall never allow the economic system to operate to aggravate the concentration of wealth and the means of production to the common detriment (Article 39-c).
Ground water is a great resource of people's good, beyond private ownership, and so indubitably belongs to the community that, sans its preservation as a quintessentially social asset, the water of wells, streams, rivers and the drinking water right of common humanity will suffer grave prejudice. This is obvious to anyone with sense and sensibility, aqua-patriotism and thirst-sensitive humanism. The state is guilty of irrational, arbitrary and inhumanity if this compassionate proposition is violated by corporate avidity. The court, as the perennial sentinel of the republic and oath-bound to command compliance with the mandates of the Constitution, shall use its writ jurisdiction and breathe reality into this hallowed cosmic jurisprudence. The might and majesty of the great judicial institution shall guard even the lowliest citizen in the discharge of his fundamental duty to protect and improve ecology and environment, which include all universal blessings of a nation such as rivers, streams, tanks and wells whose very life diminishes or perishes if the basic level of ground water sinks below safety margin or pollutes its sweet innocence. By whom? By lucre-lustful "colas", carbides and toxic "affluenza" discharged by avaricious industries with malignant technology. If corporate robbery drains our ground water the basic structure of people's right to life is breached and constitutional values buried.
"To wipe every tear from every eye is our tryst with destiny" (Jawaharlal Nehru, August 15, 1947). The state and its instrumentalities, as broadly, creatively and catalytically understood in their humanist semantic dimensions, are obligated to fulfil the essential needs of the common folk who are victims of deprivation by global gargantuan corporations, especially foreign, who use their clout and operate with toxic technology and corrupt methodology. Joseph Stiglitiz, once a leading adviser inside the World Bank, exposed what he eloquently underscored as "briberisation" of the governing classes of satellite countries, which are prone to policies often described by nationalists who cherish swaraj and self-reliance as "dependencia" syndrome.
Patriotic architect Jawaharlal Nehru, authentic nation-builder Mahatma Gandhi and the socialistic republic's proud constitutional Preamble notwithstanding, America and other nations of the North have adroitly manipulated and dubiously managed to rob our resources under the guise of "development" and the illusion of advance. Union Carbide and Coca Cola et al are illustrative of this Indian vulnerability. Patriotism, in this exploitative global context, if there are patriotic politicians left, must resist this menace, which may insidiously infiltrate into the limpet media and manufacture subject minds. This exotic invasion by multinational corporations (MNCs) will spell craven cultural prostration unless we launch aggressively a Quit India movement against the stratagems of mega-corporate recolonisers. In the absence of such a militant self-defence battle, we may quail and fail as a nation, free and egalitarian.
Ecology and environment, mandatory for human survival, deserve preservation and promotion without which economic self-reliance, people's well-being and the very right to life will suffer gravely.
IT is but right to dwell upon the controversy about Coca Cola driving down to the bottom base of Plachimada, using hi-tech processes which, the local people complain, deprives them of well storage and ground water resources and other aqua potential, thereby jeopardising the necessitous right of the community to water. This fatal intimidation by an MNC has to be read imaginatively in the context of the doctrine of public trust emphatically expressed by a bench of the Supreme Court. I quote from the head-note:
"The notion that the public has a right to expect certain lands and natural areas to retain their natural characteristic is finding its way into the law of the land. The ancient Roman Empire developed a legal theory known as the `Doctrine of the Public Trust'. The Public Trust doctrine primarily rests on the principle that certain resources like air, sea, waters and the forests have such a great importance to the people as a whole that it would be wholly unjustified to make them a subject of private ownership. The said resources being a gift of nature, they should be made freely available to everyone irrespective of the status in life. The doctrine enjoins upon the government to protect the resources for the enjoyment of the general public rather than to permit their use for private ownership or commercial purposes. The courts in [the] United States are finally beginning to adopt this reasoning and are expanding the public trust to encompass new types of lands and waters. There is no reason why the public trust doctrine should not be expanded to include all ecosystems operating in our natural resources.
"Our legal system - based on English common law - includes the public trust doctrine as part of its jurisprudence. The state is the trustee of all natural resources which are by nature meant for public use and enjoyment. Public at large is the beneficiary of the sea-shore, running waters, airs, forests and ecologically fragile lands. The state as a trustee is under a legal duty to protect the natural resources. These resources meant for public use cannot be converted into private ownership. Thus the Public Trust doctrine is a part of the law of the land" (1997 Supreme Court Cases 388).
Ground water is no private asset to be exploited limitlessly by any individual or corporation. It is cosmic wealth to be preserved in trust beyond the power of the state to barter away. The paramountcy of public rights in universal property is a basic feature of public law too deeply entrenched in the divine dimensions of progressive jurisprudence that jejune judicialese cannot whittle it down. Nor shall judges blink at these timeless principles of vintage jurisprudence or allow it to wither away. The apex court, in a case of broadcasting claims of a cricket tournament, ruled that air waves have a cosmic dimension beyond private purchase by giant oligopolies at the expense of smaller claimants who have equal rights. Being a perennial reservoir of a socially indispensable source of human survival, none - not even the State - shall sap ground water since vintage human rights will then be mere mirage. Public rights and public law with infinite potential are a rare class of jurisprudence with a vision too sublime for manky legalists and moron jurists to interpret myopically, ignoring "earth democracy".
Carbide, Cola and mega-magnates cannot and shall not buy or bend our holistic and hallowed rule of law. "Small is beautiful", and when billion strong and boundless in resources, India shall not buckle under pressure from Big Business. That is India, that is Bharat and that is the meaning of meanings which the little Indian understands as democracy, not oligarchy in power through the incompetent many. The rule of law must run in aid of the rule of life and the judicature shall hold the human rights barricade to protect the least and the last no less than the billionaire barbarians who possess the money power to buy the biosphere.
THE conquest of Bharat through recolonisation using the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) is a dark plot of the West developed after the Second World War. Raeganomics is the American strategy of disguised robbery by the disingenuous operations of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). They operate through the fraudulent philanthropy of loans, aids and investments et al and the facilitatory mantras of globalisation, liberalisation, privatisation and marketisation. Money matters, man does not. Briberisation buys, self-reliance surrenders. America Inc., with its hidden agendas, corrupts, Indian tycoons collaborates. Stiglitz explained this global plot and won a Nobel Prize. I quote at length from a 1970 piece, which has burning relevance now:
The law locks up both man and womenWho steals the goose from off the common,But lets the greater felon looseWho steals the common from the goose.- AnonymousCOMMents
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