The existing system of selection of members of the Devaswom boards (temple administration bodies) of Kerala lacked transparency and provided room for favoritism, the High Court observed on Monday.
While considering a petition which argued that the existing method of selection of members of the Devaswom boards, which administer several hundred temples in the State, was unconstitutional, a division bench of the High Court proposed guidelines for making the process more transparent and acceptable to the people.
The court said there were insufficiencies in the current system of Devaswom appointments. Amendments to the present norms for selection of board members were necessary and the opinion of the people should be taken into consideration while selecting members, it said. The petition was filed by TG Mohandas, State convener of the intellectual cell of the BJP.
The Travancore and Cochin Devaswoms are governed by boards comprising one president and two members each. As per the present system, one of the members in each board is selected by the Hindu members of the State Assembly and the second member of each board by the Hindu members of the Cabinet.
In the petition, Mohandas pointed out that the two major political fronts in the State – CPI(M)-led lDF and the Congress-headed UDF which had been ruling the State alternately – even used to issue whips in connection with the selection of the board members. He alleged that this method was fraught with political interests.
Observing that the process of selection of members to the Devaswom boards lacked clarity, the court pointed out that members were being inducted into the administration bodies without any prior indication about who was being appointed. This process had to change as selection of dependents of political parties to the board seemed to be easy, the court said.
There should be a system by which the people could have prior information about the persons being inducted into the Devaswom boards, the High Court said. It expressed the hope that the Government would take necessary and appropriate steps to correct the anomalies by taking into consideration the guidelines proposed by the court.
The court observed that there was an element of secrecy in the selection method in which only the Assembly members and Ministers knew about the details of the persons being considered for the posts.