Religious Leader's Arrest in Killing Incites Holy Men and Hindu Nationalists Across India

By AMY WALDMAN

Published: December 5, 2004

ANCHIPURAM, India - On a recent evening at the Kanchi Mutt, a Hindu monastery and seminary, all seemed as it had always been. Brahmin men with holy paste on their faces and sacred thread on their bare chests prostrated themselves in worship before an elephant. There were pictures everywhere of the institution's smiling pontiff, Jayendra Saraswati, perhaps the highest-profile Hindu leader in India today.

Nothing suggested that the latest pictures of Mr. Saraswati, on television screens and newspapers' front pages nationwide, showed him being led to prison, accused of the murder of a former devotee.

Mr. Saraswati's arrest on Nov. 11, the eve of the Hindu festival Diwali, has startled India and galvanized holy men and Hindu nationalists across the country. They have staged fasts and sit-ins, called strikes and protests, and vowed that divine retribution would be taken.

Supporters call the arrest an attack on Hinduism itself and say that Mr. Saraswati, 71, was a victim of a conspiracy by anti-Hindu politicians trying to capture lower caste or Muslim votes and a state government coveting the spiritual institution's abundant properties.

The police say the only conspiracy was one Mr. Saraswati orchestrated when a group of men on Sept. 3 killed A. Sankararaman, 52, the manager of a temple here who had vocally challenged Mr. Saraswati's accommodation to money and modernity.

The uproar speaks partly of the desire of Hindu nationalists, including the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., which lost parliamentary elections in May, for an issue to galvanize supporters, and partly to the status of Mr. Saraswati himself.

Presidents and prime ministers have sought his blessings, and his counsel. The B.J.P.-led government asked him to solve the country's most intractable dispute between Hindus and Muslims, although he did not succeed. A phone call from him could secure for a devotee a bank loan, a meeting with a government minister or even, some speculate, a ministerial berth.

Hinduism is a decentralized religion that has no pope, but some say Mr. Saraswati tried to become one. Yet on the streets of this temple town - the swami's seat - the response to his arrest has been strangely muted. Residents say that is because Mr. Saraswati's moral stature had declined here even as his national and international profile rose.

Over the decades, he became less a religious leader than a political power broker - one often associated with the Hindu nationalist movement - and less an ascetic than the chief executive of a vast empire of schools, hospitals, trusts and real estate whose assets are said to run into hundreds of millions of dollars.

The silence also testifies to India's evolving caste and ethnic politics, of which this southern state, Tamil Nadu, has been the embodiment. Despite Mr. Saraswati's efforts to reach out to lower castes, his institution remains dominated by Brahmins, who constitute the top of the caste hierarchy but politically have been under siege here for decades by lower castes.

The Kanchi Mutt sees itself as serving humanity by ensuring the preservation of the way of life set out in the Vedas, the ancient Hindu scriptures. Its critics see it as preserving an oppressive caste system, backing the Brahmins' priestly role.

The state's chief minister, Jayalalithaa, a Brahmin former film star, once sought Mr. Saraswati's advice. Now, his defenders say, she has authorized his persecution because she sees it as an avenue to lower caste or Muslim votes.

The man who was killed, Mr. Sankararaman, was a strict Brahmin who had once been a devotee of the Kanchi Mutt, but in recent years became a gadfly, or perhaps simply a pest. A strong, even rigid, traditionalist, he became increasingly perturbed by Mr. Saraswati's actions.

Mr. Saraswati's predecessor had been a respected ascetic who, when he left the monastery at all, traveled India on foot. Mr. Saraswati preferred the air-conditioned comfort of cars and the ease of planes, even the private aircraft of the wealthy industrialists who provided the money for many of his projects.

While Mr. Saraswati's predecessor would never allow himself to be in the company of an unmarried woman, said T. A. Kannan, 35, a family friend of the dead man, Mr. Saraswati observed no such strictures.

"He's talking to so many ladies," Mr. Kannan said, disdainfully.

All of this disturbed Mr. Sankararaman, as did the question of what was being done with the monastery's money. Several years ago he became a pseudonymous pamphleteer, openly distributing reams of material critical of Mr. Saraswati. In 2001, when Mr. Saraswati was planning a trip to China, Mr. Sankararaman took him to court, arguing that it was against tradition for a Hindu religious leader to cross the seas.

The trip was canceled, but after that, said Mr. Sankararaman's son, Anand Sharma, 20, the family was no longer welcome at the Kanchi Mutt.

Whether or not Mr. Saraswati ordered the killing, which will be determined in an as yet unscheduled trial before a judge, the well of sympathy here runs shallow. The volunteers in the Kanchi Mutt defend their swami. But on the street, all of those interviewed - including some Brahmins - said they suspected him of involvement in the killing, though that may be because local news reports have been shaped by police leaks.

More than that, residents describe Mr. Saraswati as a man about whom hangs an air of moral dissoluteness and whose accessibility depends on the finances of those who seek him.

S. Subathra, 24, a physiotherapist and a member of an intermediate caste, said she had studied in one of Mr. Saraswati's schools. "From school days itself I don't have any good thought of him," she said. She cited rumors of him having "illegal contacts," and said that Brahmins received preferential treatment at the school and the monastery.

"He's not a representative of Hinduism, or a pillar of it - in any way," she said.