An instruction given by the Reserve Bank to major temples and temple administration bodies in Kerala to inform on the stocks of gold in their possession has caused worries among devotees and Hindu outfits in the context of the reported Government move to sell gold or to float bonds for it stocked in the country to tide over the alarming current account deficit.
Authorities of the major Devaswom Boards — temple administration bodies — have confirmed that they have received the Reserve Bank instruction. However, Devaswom officials said that they had not yet decided on the response they should make to the Central Bank, claiming that they needed high-level discussion before taking any decision on the matter.
Though the Reserve Bank has clarified that this is in no way a prelude to acquiring temple gold for sales but it is part of a routine procedure, devotees are not prepared to accept it. According to Salim Gangadharan, Regional Director, RBI, this is nothing but “a statistical exercise’. The RBI had no plan to acquire gold from temple administration bodies, he said.
However, devotees feel that the Reserve Bank instruction to temple bodies is indeed intended at exploring the possibility of acquiring it to offset the effects of the huge current account deficit the country is facing. They fear that the RBI could issue another instruction soon to sell the gold held in temple vaults.
An official of the Travancore Devaswom Board, the body that administers several hundred temples including the famous lord Ayyappa shrine of Sabarimala, expressed the suspicion that the RBI instruction could be part of a long-term move to “rob the Hindu shrines of their property to finance the country’s administration if there is no such immediate plan.”
He said this suspicion had been there ever since conflicting opinions from various government and non-government bodies had come out after the revelation that the secret chests of the lord Padmanabha Swamy temple at Thiruvananthapuram had been holding gold, precious stones and historical coins worth over `100,000 crore in material value alone.
Alleging ulterior motives behind the RBI letter, Hindu Aikya Vedi secretary Brahmachari Bhargavaram said, “This Reserve Bank move is suspicious. It is necessary to understand the real intention of the move to target the property of shrines of one religion alone. Most of the gold stocks in temples were collected centuries ago, even before Governments came into being.”
State BJP general secretary AN Radhakrishnan pointed out that rulers had targeted property of Hindus even from the time of the British. “There is a huge risk here. Three major Devaswom boards in Kerala are being ruled by panels nominated by the Congress party and its allies,” Radhakrishnan said, indicating that the move was against even the spirit of secularism.
Sreekanth Nair, a devout devotee of lord Gurvayurappa, deity of the famous lord Karishna temple at Guruvayur in Thrissur district, said, “Certain politicians and all rationalists have a feeling that temple gold is national property. They are hallucinating.”
On Friday, CPI(M) member KN Balagopal raised the issue in the Rajya Sabha demanding the Government to provide a convincing explanation. “There is a problem if the Government, which has been giving tax exemptions worth lakhs of crores of rupees to corporate houses, is eyeing temple property when it goes pauper,” he told the media later.