Feet of clay

A self-styled pontiff, a fictitious history and plenty of wheeling dealing — the Kanchi muth has a greater stake in worldly affairs than in the spiritual

Mohan Guruswamy Delhi

Call it hubris, but the Kanchi Shankaracharya, Jayendra Saraswathy, will be remembered, rightly or wrongly, as the man who murdered Sankararaman, the former manager of the Kanchi Muth. This will be so whether he sent the killers, as the State is suggesting, or whether the killers set off on their own to rid the much-loved priest of his troublesome former employee. No one disputes that Sankararaman was murdered because he picked a fight with the self-styled pontiff of the Tamil Brahmins.

I got my first intimation of the clout that the Kanchi Shankaracharya holds when I once went to meet a senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)/Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) leader who was later to become an important minister in the erstwhile Atal Behari Vajpayee government. My host appeared particularly cheerful, telling me that the reason for his beaming mien was the Shankaracharya's ridding him of a serious doubt that had been gnawing at him for quite a while — not directly, perhaps, but through the columns of a magazine popular with New Delhi's political elite, Astrology Today.

It seems that my political friends had been unsure if a puja performed with reconstituted Mother Dairy milk was of valid sanctity or whether the ritual required milk fresh from the cow's udder. Jayendra Saraswathy apparently resolved the last of the great unanswered questions of Hindu liturgy by coming down strongly on the side of fresh unsterilised cow's milk. More than what it told me about the trivial questions that keep the nation's high-and-mighty preoccupied, the conversation told me about the power and influence of the Kanchi Shankaracharya.

I later had a more direct experience of the Shankaracharya's power when, as advisor to former finance minister Yashwant Sinha, I was "invited" to call on the Shankaracharya at Secunderabad's Skandagiri temple. When I informed Sinha, and former home minister L K Advani, of this, both suggested I proceed straightaway. As I sat on the cold marble floor of the Shankaracharya's temporary quarters in the temple, listening to the pontiff's worldview — the Christian world is lost and seeking answers, the Islamic reaction was one last eruption before the golden age of Hinduism — I noticed a plaque declaring that the room was built due to the generosity of Ramesh Gelli, former chairperson of the now defunct Global Trust Bank (GTB).

God's work done, the seer got down to God's business. He dug out a tattered briefcase and pulled out a bunch of folders listing some very temporal matters he wanted attended to by the Union finance ministry in a certain specified manner. First among them was the matter of the GTB, which had come under the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) scanner even way back in 1998. The next pertained to the control of the Tamil Nadu Mercantile Bank, where the influential Nadar community had united to deny the Sterling Group's Sivasankaran control, despite his having purchased a majority of its shares. In this matter, S Gurumurthy, the RSS's man for all seasons and reasons, quite rightly rooted for Sivasankaran, but the Shankaracharya tilted towards the Nadar community. The beauty of this game was that Jayendra Saraswathy gave Gurumurthy to understand that he actually favoured Sivasankaran. While doing so, the Shankaracharya enjoined me not to reveal this to Gurumurthy. Quite clearly, this Shankaracharya knew the ways of the world!