A Nepali lawyer asked the courts in 2018 to ban Indian ascetic monks called Naga Sadhus from a temple in Kathmandu during a festival for the Hindu deity Shiva.
Petitioner Yagyamurti Neupane argued that the Naga Sadhus disturbed other devotees celebrating Maha Shivaratri at the Pashupatinath temple.
The case reached the country’s Supreme Court, which dismissed the petition last year but announced it only on 27 August. The ruling allows the monks in the temple without wearing clothes.
“Nudity and obscenity are not the same. Nudity, when practiced as part of religious or cultural tradition, cannot automatically be considered offensive,” the court said in its ruling.
A 45-year-old Naga Sadhu, Eakadasa Baba, welcomed the decision and said that they don’t roam around the city or villages without clothes.
“We remain unclothed only in our own place, within the temple,” Baba said, according to Agence France-Presse.
Meanwhile, the mostly senior citizen residents of Olive Dell Ranch in the San Jacinto foothills of San Bernardino County, California, USA are taking the cue from the Naga Sadhu case.
They are suing the new owners of the 73-year-old mobile homes ranch for imposing a new rule that they dislike.
Frances M. Campbell, one of the attorneys representing more than 50 current and former residents now suing the resort, told The Guardian that the legal action is an anti-discrimination case.
The lawsuit, filed in California state court, accuses the property’s owners — Mark Glasier, Brian Cleland and Tina Coffelt — of violating civil rights, harassing tenants, engaging in elder abuse, and conspiring to drive out the nudist residents.
The Olive Dell owners officially announced it was going textile in late 2024, but the residents, who are naturist, argued that being forced into clothes is like forcing a religious group to abandon its rituals, New York Post (NYP) reports.
The plaintiffs are seeking damages and an injunction restoring Olive Dell’s status as a nudist park, according to NYP.