New twist to seer case - Shankararaman wasn’t associated with Mutt, TN tells SC

S.S. Negi
Legal Correspondent

New Delhi, January 6

The arguments on the bail petition of Kanchi Shankaracharya Jayendra Sarswati in the Shankararaman murder case remained inconclusive today before the Supreme Court even as the Tamil Nadu Government gave a new twist to the whole episode, admitting that the deceased had never been officially associated with the Kanchi Mutt.

This was revealed to a Bench of Chief Justice R.C. Lahoti, Mr Justice G.P. Mathur and Mr Justice P.P. Naolekar by Tamil Nadu Government counsel K.T.S. Tulsi when he was pointedly asked about the motive for the seer to plan the murder of Shankararaman. “Was the deceased associated with the Mutt? And if so, when did he leave it?” the court asked.

“The father of Shankararaman was a manager of the seer till 1998 and the son used to work with him. He was much concerned about certain financial irregularities in the Mutt and had written 39 letters to the Commissioner of Charity of the Mutt Trust about this, which was the reason for differences between the seer and the deceased,” Mr Tulsi said.

When the court asked if Shankararaman wrote these letters in any capacity as Mutt official or a public person, the Tamil Nadu Government counsel said “certainly he wrote them as a public person. But he was a manager of another temple and was deeply concerned about the affairs of the Mutt.”

Asked as from where the letters were recovered, Mr Tulsi said drafts of most of them were recovered from the office of the deceased and their contents were published in Tamil magazine “Nakeeran”. But they were certainly sent to the commissioner through courier, he claimed.

When the court repeatedly asked Mr Tulsi to “pinpoint” the evidence that linked the Shankaracharya to the murder, he said co-accused Kadiraman had given a confession to the Magistrate on November 19 about the conspiracy hatched at a meeting in the Mutt at the instance of the seer on September 1 last, two days before the murder. He also said that two other witnesses had confirmed the conspiracy whose names were in the case diary which was placed before the court.

Countering the state government claim, Mr Nariman said a manager of the Mutt, arrested in the case, had told the police that the money of the sale deed was in fact deposited in Indian Overseas Bank in May last year. “After the court notice, the police had arrested two more persons and got the confession of one of them recorded before the Magistrate on December 31 in a bid to make a case after Kadiraman had retracted his confession,” Mr Nariman said, while trying to point out various “loopholes” in the prosecution theory.

Mr Nariman said “the transaction of money from ICICI Bank earlier appears to have been given by the police now in its reply placed before this court and a new twist about the payment of Rs 50 lakh has been given”.

“There is no evidence with the police linking the pontiff to the murder, except to a confession of a co-accused, which he had retraced after five days,” he said, adding that in the absence of “substantive” evidence, confession was a “very weak evidence”.