Crowds follow Kanchi seer to Kalavai

By R. Bhagwan Singh

Kalavai (Tamil Nadu), Jan. 12: The sleepy little village of Kalavai, about 110 km from Chennai, is the newest pilgrim centre for the Hindus. People are rushing in by all available transport from posh cars to bicycles and even on foot to have the darshan of the Kanchi Sankaracharya, Sri Jayendra Saraswati, who has chosen to stay at the Veda Patashala here after release from the Vellore jail on Tuesday following the Supreme Court granting him bail in the Sankararaman murder case.

There were some 200 cars last evening when Periyavar (senior pontiff) arrived at the Kalavai ashram. The number is more today. Many people from the surrounding villages are thronging here for his blessings, says a mutt official.

The police are having a tough time regulating the traffic along the bumpy mud road to the little old building, where the samadhis of two earlier Sankaracharyas are situated. A few enterprising men have already started putting up little shops to sell flowers and fruits for the devotees to carry as offerings to the guru.

Because Krishna was born in a prison cell there, Mathura is considered the holiest of holy places by the Hindus. Its the same with Kalavai now, says Arjun Sampath, president of the Hindu Makkal Katchi (Hindu People’s Party), who led a 100-strong group of slogan-shouting demonstrators who had hailed the seer as the protector of Hinduism as he stepped out of the Vellore jail on Tuesday.

It was only on seeing the spontaneous congregation of not only the mutt devotees but several hundreds of others that the Jayalalithaa Government had now rushed to the Supreme Court seeking modification of bail conditions to move the seer out of Tamil Nadu, argues Mr Sampath. According to him, there is now a groundswell of support for the sankara mutt and its two pontiffs falsely implicated in the murder case.

Meanwhile, Jayendra on Wednesday performed the special poojas, beginning with the Dhanurmasya pooja in the most auspicious early hours. He also took a new dhandam (holy staff symbolising headship of the mutt) since the earlier one was polluted by jail exposure. Seated on a stool behind a cloth curtain, he completed the pooja and signalled to the assistants to pass on the aarthi (blessed camphor light) to the devotees for worship.

A mutt official Pollachi Mahadevan said the mutt would temporarily function out of Kalavai as the Supreme Court had barred the seer from entering the mutt headquarters at Kancheepuram (till the police filed the chargesheet). He said the septuagenarian seer appeared cheerful and rested last night after performing poojas. The Chandramouleeswara idol and other pooja paraphernalia were rushed to Kalavai from the Kanchi Mutt yesterday. The pontiff would not talk to anyone for another couple of days as he was still on mouna vrath (vow of silence), the official said.

In a related development, the state prosecutor K. Duraiswwamy today assured a sessions court in Chennai that Jayendra Saraswati would not be arrested in a third case, the assault of a temple priest Thirukottiyur Madhavan, till January 20. Opposing the anticipatory bail plea, the prosecutor told the court that since the state had approached the Supreme Court to modify its orders on the pontiffs bail conditions, the present case should be adjourned till January 20.

To this, Jayendra’s lawyer sought an undertaking that he would not be arrested before that date and the prosecution agreed. There are strong rumours that the police are implicating the Sankaracharya in the assault of Thirukottiyur Mahadevan in August 2004 in Chennai allegedly for campaigning against the seer. Apart from the Sankararaman murder case, the pontiff has been charged with ordering the brutal attack on a former mutt aide Radhakrishnan in Chennai two years ago. The Chennai high court granted him bail in this case.

Meanwhile the state government on Wednesday shifted out home secretary Sheela Rani Chunkath and director-general of police I.K. Govind replacing them with Pawan Raina, the state’s resident commissioner in Delhi and DGP (intelligence) A.X. Alexander respectively. Official circles indicated that the two officers were transferred after they expressed differences over the arrest of junior seer Vijayendra Saraswati on Monday. In Chennai, about 45 BJP workers, including the state president C.P. Radhakrishnan, were taken into custody for holding demonstration against the arrest of the junior pontiff. They were later released.