Look who’s backing Shankaracharya

Author: IANS
Publication: The New Indian Express

Tamil Brahmins may or may not have come out in support of arrested Shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswathi of Kanchipuram, but sections of the underprivileged Dalit classes have expressed anger at the treatment meted out to the seer.

Among the first to come out on the streets were members of the Hindu Munnani, a Hindu group primarily comprising Dalits.

Activists of this group have also clashed with police outside courts in Chennai and Kanchipuram.

They have also staked out in front of the Vellore jail where the Shankaracharya has spent a week for his suspected involvement in the murder of a former accountant of the Kanchipuram mutt.

While Hindu groups have been protesting, the anger of Dalits is an unusual phenomenon, given that the Shankaracharya traditionally represents upper caste Hindus.

Four Dalit hamlets in Porayar of the Nagapattinam district, 600 km south of the Tamil Nadu capital, are stunned by his arrest.

In the pontiff's birthplace, Irulneeki village, there is considerable anger among the 150 Dalit families over the arrest of the Shankaracharya who was reportedly in the process of making it a model village.

Jayendra Saraswathi formed the Chandrasekara Rural Development Trust there to launch several development schemes. The trust is credited with constructing 40 model group houses and a health centre with two doctors and six paramedics to help.

Supported by the mutt, the Tamil Nadu government has also taken up a pilot scheme for Dalit housing in the village.

Members of the scheduled tribe of 'Kattunanyakans', who are scavengers by profession, received financial help from the Shankaracharya to build a temple for the Amman mother goddess in 1992.

Now Natesan, the village council chief, tells journalists with tears in his eyes: "Shankaracharya taught us to worship. When many still considered us untouchables, he treated us with dignity".

Similar is the outpouring of protest in Rajivpuram, where another such temple is under construction, thanks to funds from the Kanchipuram mutt.

In the Bhudanoor village, 200 Dalit families have stories about the ways in which the Shankaracharya helped them.

The Shankaracharya has taken much flak for reaching out to Dalits, something rarely seen in Hindu priesthood that is dominated by a Brahminical order.

Critics accused him of breaking Hindu codes by blessing widows and Dalits and allowing general access to the mutt and temples.

But loyalists say there could be no greater humiliation to the pontiff than having to spend the night in an all women's police station.

The pontiff was arrested Nov 11 for his alleged links to the September murder of a former official of the Kanchipuram mutt, Sankara Raman.

A Tamil Nadu court on Friday permitted police to take him into three-day custody to question him intensively, even after he vehemently denied a murder charge against him.