Jayalalithaa's outrage on Kanchi mutt

Angry Hindus demand dismissal
By R. Balashankar

With the catholicity of a crusader, the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa has unleashed a witch-hunt against the sacred Hindu abode, the Kanchi mutt. It is an all out war on the mutt, manipulated and orchestrated through rumour mongering and hired electronic channels going beyond the simple investigations of a murder charge. Every day a new canard of calumny is put out only to let it die after a few days for want of substance.

Nobody other than the vested interests today suspect the innocence of the Kanchi Acharya, His Holiness Jayendra Saraswati.

She has even appointed a new DGP, A.X. Alexander, and a new Home Commissioner, Syed Muneer Hoda, to carry on with the dubious job, transferring all the officials who were so far investigating the Shankararaman murder case.

There is no sin on this earth that Jayalalithaa has not committed. Like the Ravana, nay Shoorpanakha, her ultimate sin is the heinous attack on the holy men, the holy shrine, the Kanchi mutt, with a tradition of 2,500 years, which is hallowed as the last blessed abode of Adi Shankara. Jayalalithaa is corrupt, lawless, unprincipled, without scruples, tyrannical and despotic suffering from avarice of power and wealth. Her talking of law taking its natural course is like a demon reciting the scripture; she ought to have said that vendetta has taken a full course.

Her selection of officials with a peculiar minority tag is devious. For, the country has a tradition of officials acting impartially during their discharge of duty. But it smacks of her vicious motive, the desire to send out a message louder than the deed. For whom is she stooping so low?

Technically speaking, this is no occasion to go into the legal merits of the charges. In Supreme Court the allegation fell apart like a pack of pebbles; she now has to reconstruct it all over again.

Jaya's selection of officials with a peculiar minority tag is devious. For, the country has a tradition of officials acting impartially during their discharge of duty. But it smacks of her vicious motive: the desire to send out a message louder than the deed.

The scene is worse than that of embittered Shoorpanakha in the court of Ravana. The release of the Acharya on bail has petrified her so much that she doesn’t want him to stay in Chennai. She wants him to be transported to north India with court direction—look at the contradiction!

For two months the argument was that the Acharya was running away to some foreign land—away from Tamil Nadu to Nepal, that his following is very limited—only 3 per cent of the population in Tamil Nadu, that too a divided set of Brahmins all of whom are anyway not his devotees; and now, that his presence in Tamil Nadu will influence the witnesses and the prosecution. How fantastic? An autocrat Chief Minister like Jayalalithaa, who has all the resources at her command, saying this.

Kanchi Acharya’s authority is his moral strength. It is not his possessions, position or power. It is the moral strength of a saintly person that troubles the tyrant ruler. We have seen more powerful persons, Chief Ministers, former Prime Ministers, accused of criminal charges—but not a demand like the one Jayalalithaa has made ever been expressed— that the presence of the accused in the state will derail the prosecution. Is it the immorality of the accusations that have frightened her of the very existence of the Acharya? Or is it the agony of a Lady Macbeth, whose sins all the waters of the ocean cannot wash?

Jaya is hopping mad at the Supreme Court slap

She has managed to do what the Muslim invaders and the British could not do for centuries. She has broken a 2,500-year old worship ritual ‘trikal puja’ in the Kanchipuram mutt.

The air was thick near the Kanchi mutt with the smell of crackers bursted and incense offered at the news of the release of the mutt’s senior Acharya, His Holiness Shri Jayendra Saraswati by the order of the Supreme Court on January 10. The Tamil Nadu police muzzled in, forcing their way into the mutt to arrest the surprised younger Acharya of the mutt, His Holiness Shri Vijayendra Saraswati. The people who had gathered were at a loss to understand as to why the police was arresting him on the same charges in which the elder Acharya had just been released on bail. Worse, the mutt would now be truly headless with both the Acharyas forced out.

Seriously, the crime that the Tamil Nadu government has committed is beyond pardon. It is not an individual or two she has sinned against. She has sinned against the conscience of a people for whom the mutt and its Acharyas are venerable. The Chief Minister, who paraded herself as a believing, practicing Hindu a few months ago, sacrificed the faith of millions at the altar of political expediency. What benefits other than the vote bank would she get is best answered by her. Even the most ardent of her supporters are unable to explain the ultimate high-handedness of the Tamil Nadu police in arresting Shri Vijayendra Saraswati within a few hours of the release on bail of the senior Acharya. Particularly after the apex court passed serious strictures against the state government and its police.

Her ultimate sin is the heinous attack on the holy men, the holy shrine, the Kanchi mutt, with a tradition of 2,500 years, which is hallowed as the last blessed abode of Adi Shankara. Jayalalithaa is corrupt, lawless, unprincipled, without scruples, tyrannical and despotic suffering from avarice of power and wealth. Her talking of law taking its natural course is like a demon reciting the scripture.

For the first time since the bizarre charge and the arrest of the senior Acharya, the law spoke in favour of the Acharya. Till now, it had been a one-sided story with both the local and the Chennai High Court repeating the prosecution’s case and concurring. A three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, comprising Chief Justice R.C. Lahoti, Justice G.P. Mathur, and Justice P. P. Naolekar (January 10, 2005) concurred with the petitioner’s (the Acharya) counsel, F.S. Nariman. In the ruling on the bail application, the court said, “No worthwhile prima facie evidence apart from the alleged confessions have been brought to our notice to show that the petitioner along with the two accused was party to a conspiracy…it does not appeal to reason that he suddenly decided to have had Sankararaman murdered and entered into a conspiracy for the said purpose.”

The Supreme Court also found the prosecution’s witnesses, who were outsiders and not mutt officials, unacceptable. It is unlikely, it said, that the Acharya would speak about the commissioning of murder at such a time and place where his talks could be heard by total strangers.

Obviously the Jayalalithaa government and her police did not proceed on the case on any legal merit. They wanted the case to be fought in the media and decided by the anti-Hindu writings and cheap whispers. In that they had nearly succeeded. The print and electronic media in Tamil competed with each other in running down the Acharya and the mutt. If one were to begin listing cases of ‘maligning reputation’, it would involve almost all the print and electronic media in Tamil. Leading the list would be the lady's own Jaya TV and Karunanidhi’s Sun TV.

The prosecution’s case first said they had traced withdrawal of money from ICICI Bank to carry out the murder. The bank record showed nothing. Then it said of a land sale to finance the crime. Again records said the money had indeed been deposited within a week of the land sale. The police had initially waved some account number in ICICI Bank, which it later withdrew. Then the police came up with the attempt to murder charge against the Acharya in two other cases. The original case was left hanging. Just like spinning a Tamil movie formula, a woman element was introduced in the form of one Usha, with whom the Acharya was supposed to have been close. The police declared her as absconding. The woman herself went to the police and said she had received monetary help from the mutt for her cancer treatment.

That’s when the well-known Tamil writer came out with her ‘shocking’ story of ‘misconduct’ by the Acharya. Anuradha Raman, considered by some as progressive, bold and outspoken, claimed that she was keeping the incident a secret. One would have expected a woman like her to speak out if any offence had been committed against her. The Kanchi mutt, by now deeply anguished by such third-rate cooked up scandals, released photographs of Anuradha Raman at a function at the mutt as recent as last year, which indicated that she was not ‘suffering’ as she claimed.

The Kanchi mutt enjoys a status in the Hindu society, which few other such institutions can claim. The mutt is involved in activities that are spiritual, religious and social. The amount of social work the mutt sponsors is rather huge. And whenever social issues challenging the Hindu society have come up, the Acharyas have responded to them, both religiously and spiritually. At a time when most Hindu organisations were shocked into inaction over the mass conversions in Meenakshipuram, the Kanchi mutt initiated a travelling temple programme, in which consecrated images of gods and goddesses were sent to Harijan bastis. If they cannot come to the temple, the temples should go to them, was the philosophy.

Paramacharya, the revered Chandrashekharendra Saraswati, not directly getting involved in the freedom movement—it being a political issue—had rendered support to the cause. He began wearing khadi material, which sent a definite signal to the Hindu society, which looked upon him as an incarnation. During Emergency, when Indira Gandhi went to meet him, the Paramacharya was in maunavrata (observing silence), indicating his reaction to the oppressive regime.

It is as part of a calculated slander campaign that a section of the media is describing the mutt as having limited appeal to the Brahmins, who constitute only 3 per cent of the voting population in Tamil Nadu. The Kanchi mutt exercises far more religious and spiritual influence among the Hindus there. It is this fear of the mutt’s influence that is behind the conspiracy to defame it. We need not go into the motives of Jayalalithaa in playing this dangerous, dirty game.

That there is a calculated conspiracy behind the cases is beyond argument. Shankararaman was not the only man murdered in Tamil Nadu in 2004, nor was he a man of such social standing that his murder should attract such attention. The Chief Minister paid Rs 5 lakh to the widow of Shankararaman. Did she offer such largesse to all the widows of Tamil Nadu whose husbands were murdered? In fact in the last month, two high-profile murders, that of Aladi Aruna and an AIADMK MLA, did not move Jayalalithaa. Not a single arrest so far has taken place in these murders. So much for the efficiency of the police in Tamil Nadu! So why did the government constitute a huge team of policemen to investigate this Kanchi murder? Then the series of police leaks in the press, beginning as a whisper campaign against the mutt, culminating in the DMK taking a hard political position over it. The same DMK today is unwilling to support the state government’s action, because it has realised that the case was only a straw figure for scaring away the crows, keen on sharing the vote bank.