Padmanabhaswamy temple: SC should just clean up the act and leave

A Supreme Court bench headed by Chief Justice-designate RM Lodha on Thursday decided to appoint a five-member committee headed by the Thiruvananthapuram district judge and four others to manage the Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple in the city. When the temple’s vaults were opened three years ago, gold, gems and valuable items worth over Rs 1,00,000 crore were discovered. Former Comptroller and Auditor General Vinod Rai has now been asked to audit the assets, finances and properties of the temple. [caption id=“attachment_1496459” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The Padmanabhaswamy temple in Kerala. Reuters[/caption] The court had appointed an amicus curiae, Gopal Subramaniam, to take a close look at how the temple and its properties were managed, and his report has been shocking. Among other things, Subramaniam said: “There was failure on the part of the temple management to account effectively for the offerings, whether in cash/currency/gold/silver ornaments. The auditors of the temple have failed in performing their ethical duties.” Taking serious note of this, the Supreme Court has now ordered the temple’s current management, which includes the Travancore royal family, the traditional trustee of the temple, to hand over the keys of all kallaras (vaults) and donation boxes to the new five-member committee. The Times of India reports that two new vaults were discovered by the amicus “during his 35-day inspection of the temple.” If the committee’s job is to audit the treasures and hand the temple back to its traditional keepers and patrons, then it’s a good decision. When temple assets are mismanaged, the state and the courts can and should step in to set things right. However, if the committee is going to be a permanent imposition on the temple and its devotees, it will amount to interference with the religious autonomy that temples, mosques and churches are guaranteed under the constitution. The riches that are part of the temple belong to the devotees. This has attracted the vested interests, including the state government of Kerala, which would like nothing better than to control the assets in the same way the Andhra Pradesh government controls the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD). The Times of India report, in fact, notes that the Kerala government had, through additional solicitor general KV Vishwanathan, told the court that “as a representative of the people, (it) could not be shut out from temple affairs.” Actually, it should be. The temple is separate from the state. The state cannot, and should not, have an interest in the treasures of religious institutions beyond ensuring that they are audited and used in a clean manner. But the sheer size of the riches in the Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple appears to have drawn covetous glances. Three years ago, as this writer had noted in Firstpost, the Left wanted to appropriate it for the state budget. KN Panicker, Left historian, wanted the money to be treated as the legacy of the state. “The assets accumulated over centuries were the offerings made by kings and devotees. The kings from elsewhere had also contributed. It is a state property with a lot of public contributions,” Panicker had told The Indian Express then_._ Judge CS Rajan (retired), who was part of the panel appointed by the Supreme Court to initially inventory the temple’s assets, also said that the money came largely from kings. “What we have found in the temple are offerings made by successive kings of the Travancore princely state.” Former Supreme Court justice VR Krishna Iyer, was quoted by India Today as saying that the money should be used in public interest. “The treasure should be handed over to a national trust and spent for the welfare of the poor.” What ordinary devotees of the temple will be wondering is whether the Supreme Court’s appointment of the five-member committee to administer it, and get it audited by Vinod Rai, is going to make their views, and those of its traditional trustees, including the royal family of Travancore, irrelevant. It is worth recalling what the Supreme Court had itself said about state intervention in the Chidambaram Natarajar temple case. As we noted earlier, the court overturned the takeover of the temple by the Tamil Nadu government, which had appointed its own executive trustee on the plea that the temple was not properly administered. Set up in the 19th century, the temple was run by a community called the Podhu Dikshitars before the state stepped in. The court, while rubbishing the state’s claims, said that even if a temple had to be taken over for the stated reasons, the state had no business staying on as administrator once the damage of mismanagement was undone. A bench, comprising Justices BS Chauhan and J Chalemeshwar, in a judgment on 6 January 2014, held that “even if the management of a temple is taken over to remedy (an) evil, the management must be handed over to the person concerned immediately after the evil stands remedied. Continuation thereafter would tantamount to usurpation of their proprietary rights or violation of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution in favour of the persons deprived. Therefore, taking over of the management in such circumstances must be for a limited period.” The Supreme Court now needs to take its own advice when it comes to the Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple, where it has decided to appoint a new committee and an auditor to set things right. Once the job is done, the court needs to pull back. It is not the court’s job, or the state’s to permanently run religious institutions. That is not secularism.