Author: IANS
Publication: The New Indian Express
Date: November 21, 2004
URL: http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IET20041120131457&Page=T&Title=Southern+News+%2D+Tamil+Nadu&Topic=337&
Tamil Brahmins may or may not have
come out in support of arrested Shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswathi of Kanchipuram,
but sections of the underprivileged Dalit classes have expressed anger
at the treatment meted out to the seer.
Among the first to come out on the
streets were members of the Hindu Munnani, a Hindu group primarily comprising
Dalits.
Activists of this group have also
clashed with police outside courts in Chennai and Kanchipuram.
They have also staked out in front
of the Vellore jail where the Shankaracharya has spent a week for his suspected
involvement in the murder of a former accountant of the Kanchipuram mutt.
While Hindu groups have been protesting,
the anger of Dalits is an unusual phenomenon, given that the Shankaracharya
traditionally represents upper caste Hindus.
Four Dalit hamlets in Porayar of
the Nagapattinam district, 600 km south of the Tamil Nadu capital, are
stunned by his arrest.
In the pontiff's birthplace, Irulneeki
village, there is considerable anger among the 150 Dalit families over
the arrest of the Shankaracharya who was reportedly in the process of making
it a model village.
Jayendra Saraswathi formed the Chandrasekara
Rural Development Trust there to launch several development schemes. The
trust is credited with constructing 40 model group houses and a health
centre with two doctors and six paramedics to help.
Supported by the mutt, the Tamil
Nadu government has also taken up a pilot scheme for Dalit housing in the
village.
Members of the scheduled tribe of
'Kattunanyakans', who are scavengers by profession, received financial
help from the Shankaracharya to build a temple for the Amman mother goddess
in 1992.
Now Natesan, the village council
chief, tells journalists with tears in his eyes: "Shankaracharya taught
us to worship. When many still considered us untouchables, he treated us
with dignity".
Similar is the outpouring of protest
in Rajivpuram, where another such temple is under construction, thanks
to funds from the Kanchipuram mutt.
In the Bhudanoor village, 200 Dalit
families have stories about the ways in which the Shankaracharya helped
them.
The Shankaracharya has taken much
flak for reaching out to Dalits, something rarely seen in Hindu priesthood
that is dominated by a Brahminical order.
Critics accused him of breaking
Hindu codes by blessing widows and Dalits and allowing general access to
the mutt and temples.
But loyalists say there could be
no greater humiliation to the pontiff than having to spend the night in
an all women's police station.
The pontiff was arrested Nov 11
for his alleged links to the September murder of a former official of the
Kanchipuram mutt, Sankara Raman.
A Tamil Nadu court on Friday permitted
police to take him into three-day custody to question him intensively,
even after he vehemently denied a murder charge against him.
