If Krishna is God, Is Yamuna Not Godly? This Janmashtami, Stop Worshipping the Child and Poisoning His Cradle
We sing for Krishna while Yamuna dies at 70 BOD and 8.4 million fecal coliforms. It’s time to give his river the legal rights we already give corporations.
On Janmashtami night, we will place a tiny Krishna in a tiny cradle.
We will bathe him in milk, honey and Yamuna water brought in a can from a tanker because no one would dare dip that idol in the actual Yamuna at ITO.
That is our hypocrisy in one image. We celebrate the river’s God and abandon the God’s river.
Krishna was born on Yamuna’s bank. He grew up drinking her water, swimming in her pools, defeating Kaliya to make her safe again for his people and his cows.
Today, if that same child were to swim in Delhi’s Yamuna, he would need a hazmat suit. Let’s be honest about what we have done to Krishna’s Yamuna.
A living river needs oxygen above 5 mg/l. It needs Biological Oxygen Demand – the load of organic filth it must digest – below 3 mg/l. It needs fecal coliform – our shit – below 500 MPN/100ml, max 2,500.
Here is Delhi’s Yamuna:
In January this year, she recorded her most polluted January in five years. At its worst, BOD touched 70 mg/l and fecal coliform hit 8,400,000 MPN/100ml.
Dissolved oxygen, for years, has been consistently zero, indicating the river is virtually dead as it exits the city.
It is not getting better. Last December, DPCC samples showed BOD levels at 25 mg/l at ITO Bridge, 24 mg/l at ISBT Bridge and 17 mg/l at Okhla Barrage, far exceeding the safe limit of 3 mg/l.
Fecal coliform was 92,000 MPN at ISBT Bridge, 54,000 MPN at Nizamuddin Bridge against the desirable limit of 500.
A Parliamentary panel this March said what priests won’t: the Yamuna’s capacity to sustain life in the Delhi stretch is almost non-existent, with 23 out of 33 sites failing primary standards.
We did this. The National Green Tribunal keeps saying it: untreated sewage from the drains between Wazirabad and Asgarpur is the killer.
We have built sewage treatment plants on paper and let Najafgarh, Shahdara and Maharani Bagh drains pour poison in practice. We fine a polluter a few thousand rupees and look away.
But we have also done something worse to her catchment. We cut the forests that held her monsoon.
We mined her floodplain, dammed her sisters upstream without pause, and concretized her banks.
In a climate crisis where we keep breaking emissions records, a river without a floodplain cannot cool a city, cannot recharge groundwater, cannot survive a heatwave.
When flows drop and heat rises, that same sewage becomes more concentrated, more toxic, frothier. The gharial, the migratory birds, the farmer in the Braj – all pay the price of our heat.
Which is why the question you ask on Janmashtami is the only honest one: If Krishna is God, is his river not Godly?
The world has begun to answer yes – not as poetry, but as law.
In 2017, New Zealand made the Whanganui River the first river in the world to be a legal person – an ancestor, indivisible from mountain to sea. In 2021, Canada followed.
The Innu First Nation and the regional municipality declared the Magpie River / Mutuhekau Shipu a legal person.
Now the river has nine rights, among them the right to flow, maintain biodiversity, be free from pollution, and to sue.
Colombia’s Atrato and Amazon, Ecuador’s constitutional Rights of Nature, Spain’s Mar Menor – this is now a global, Indigenous-led jurisprudence.
The logic is brutal and simple: If a corporation can be a legal person to protect its profits, why can’t a river be a legal person to protect our future?
India almost led this.
On March 20, 2017, the Uttarakhand High Court did something radical and beautiful.
It declared that “The Ganga and Yamuna, all their tributaries, streams… are declared as juristic/legal persons /living entities having the status of a legal person with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person”.
It said this was needed to protect the faith of society. Unfortunately, this lasted just 109 days.
On July 7, 2017, the Supreme Court stayed that order, ruling that India’s sacred Ganges and Yamuna rivers cannot be considered “living entities” and that rivers do not have the same rights as humans.
The government had argued: if Yamuna is a person, who will be sued when she floods?
So Yamuna went back to being a thing. A drain. A 40-km stretch that gives us 76% of the river’s pollution load but which we still treat as free real estate for our waste.
The stay was legally prudent. Morally, it was a surrender.
This Janmashtami, let’s not do another symbolic aarti on a dead riverbank. Let’s demand a real vow.
One: Make pollution data a matter of public faith. Live, location-wise BOD and fecal coliform display at every ghat, not just DPCC PDFs months later.
Two: Restore the catchment, not just the idol. A Janmashtami fund for native forests on Yamuna’s floodplain from Palla to Okhla and for catchment forests in Yamunotri.
A living floodplain is climate resilience. Concrete is not.
Three: Reopen the rights debate.
We need a River Rights Act that gives Yamuna two legal guardians – one state, one community – with power to sue polluters on behalf of the river, as New Zealand does.
Not to make the river liable for floods, but to make us liable for killing her.
Krishna didn’t fight Kaliya to punish the river. He fought Kaliya to free it. On his birthday, the least we can do is stop being Kaliya.
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