Indian judge orders Hindu gods into court

You have to appreciate the practicality of Indian judge Sunil Kumar Singh. If plaintiffs are going to fight their case on religious grounds, he's going to have the gods involved appear in court.

An Indian judge has summoned two Hindu gods to help resolve a 20-year-old property dispute.

Sunil Kumar Singh has placed notices in newspapers in the coal mining town of Dhanbad, in the eastern state of Jharkhand, asking gods Ram and Hanuman to appear in his court next week to present their arguments.

"You failed to appear in court despite notices sent by a messenger and later through registered post. You are hereby directed to appear before the court personally," Judge Singh's notice stated.

The newspaper notices were published, in keeping with accepted Indian legal practice, after two summons dispatched to the plaintiff deities were returned because their addresses were "incomplete".

The deities are, of course entitled to be represented by counsel.

The dispute is over ownership of a 1.4-acre plot in Dhanbad which adjoins a temple dedicated to Ram and another one dedicated to the monkey god Hanuman. Worshippers claim the land belongs to the gods but the priest, Manmohan Patnaik, insists that it is his.

Both sides went to court in 1987 and several years later the dispute was settled in the locals' favour. But Mr Patnaik challenged the verdict in a "fast-track court" set up to cut the backlog of millions of property cases.

I wonder. What would happen if a North American judge entertained the same notion over the dispute of a church on land owned by those who were here before anybody even mentioned the name Jesus Christ?