At Shankaracharya home, little or no protest

‘‘Who cares what becomes of him? If he got a man killed, let him pay for it,’’ shrugs taxi driver Saravanan as he parks near the house of a Jayendra Saraswati acolyte in town, where a police raid was on. Speaking to the locals, it would appear that this about sums up the town’s general attitude to the issue, which the VHP had said was no less serious than the attack on the Somnath Temple.

Jayendra Sarswati, a teacher near the matt tells you, had never managed to carry the town’s non-Brahmin majority with him. This, despite the fact that he was the one Shankaracharya who did the most to diversify the matt’s activities to uncharted areas, funded more local job generating efforts than all his predecessors, and did try to reach far out of the Brahminical orbit.

The house raided today belonged to Pashupathi, president of the Jan Kalyan, an NGO outfit founded and funded by the matt. Police commandos manned the roadside entrance, keeping out a gaggle of reporters and refusing to talk. Unconfirmed reports said simultaneous raids were on in the houses of other Jayendra aides in the outskirts, but the policemen said they had orders to keep their mouths shut.

Reports from Chennai say Income Tax sleuths have begun going through the matt wealth with a fine toothcomb. The matt and its satellite outfits and charitable bodies are together thought to be worth upward of Rs 750 crore, according to an official source.

At the tiny home of Shankara Raman, the temple manager whose killing culminated in the current mess for the Kanchi matt, his wife and children tell you how the killers had casually walked into their home that September evening, asking for Shankara Raman.

‘‘I told them that he is still in his temple office, and they left. The next thing I heard was that that they killed him there,’’ Padma, the widow, recalls.

Shankara Raman’s son says that he got to hear that that the police siezed a threat letter from his dead father’s hand bag, but knew nothing more. ‘‘He never used to tell us anything. He was a very private person,’’ he said. But at the ancient temple that the Pallava dynasty built, which dwarfs Shankara Raman’s home outside its huge walls, it is business as usual. Devotees make a beeline to the sanctum and camera-toting tourists and picnickers enjoy themselves under the shade of the huge and ornate mandapam. The only fallout from the grisly murder in that courtyard three months ago is a huge padlock on the door of the temple office.