New York Times Reports On Shankarachayra

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4. New York Times Reports On Shankarachayra

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/international/asia/05india.html

 

KANCHIPURAM, INDIA, December 5, 2004: (HPI note: We are reproducing

below in full this report by the New York Times. We have left alone

in this report their use of "Mr. Saraswati" instead of "the

Shankaracharya," but have complained to their public editor. "Mr.

Saraswati" is also being used by the BBC.)

 

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 September 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.