The judges told the people in court their views, and wrote the judgment, using very long words and some of the ancient language that Korok had heard in Balangir court. The judges said that a court could not judge about whether a hill, or group of hills, were sacred or not.

‘We can’t judge a god, or a goddess,’ said a judge, and the other two nodded their heads, agreeing.

‘We can’t comment on the beliefs of the Gonds, or any other people. The law can only decide on what is covered by the law,’ said the court.

The judges said the court could only decide if the Gonds were right in saying they should vote on the matter. The judges said this was a very rare request. People did not vote on every decision of the government. The government acted on its own, and it was understood that the government could be trusted to act for the best interests of the people.

However, said the judges, the Gonds’ lawyers had said, in this case, the government could not be trusted, and that the Gonds should be allowed to decide on their own.

So after talking about this, and looking at every part of the problem, the judges said, they had decided that they would ask for a report on the situation, before they allowed, or did not allow, the voting.

The problem was: who to ask to make the report? The judges said the Gonds had their lawyers in court, and the ministry of mines in Delhi, which wanted the hills, also had their lawyers in court. So the judges had to ask someone else, a sort of neutral party.

There was no ministry of gods and goddesses that could file a report at the Supreme Court in a matter like this, said one of the judges, and the people in court laughed. Judges make jokes too, sometimes. Jadob, sitting in a corner, did not laugh. He had been to a lot of trials in lower courts, and in his experience when judges started laughing, it meant they were not paying attention to the case, or did not care about the outcome. For Jadob, everything depended on the Supreme Court judgment. So he did not laugh or even smile.

In the end, the judges decided that since the area was forest land, the ministry of environment and forests was to make a report about everything. How the Gonds lived, how they took care of the sacred hills, what the law and order situation was, whether the police had been behaving cruelly with the Gonds, and so on. Based on all this, the court would decide whether the Gonds should be allowed to vote for the mine or not.