Battle intensifies in Kerala for Hindu temple’s $22 billion treasure
A $22 billion treasure trove unearthed beneath Kerala’s Padmanabhaswamy Temple has sparked a fierce political and public debate over ownership and how best to put the vast wealth to use. The vaults of the 16th century temple were prised open for the first time in June, since when public calls have grown for redistribution of the wealth to the poor.
Discovered in the vaults were a dazzling stash of gold ornaments, Napoleonic era coins and sacks of gemstones. The archaeological find, one of the greatest ever made in India, has triggered a fierce legal battle for custodianship, pitting the royal family of Travancore, which controls the temple, against the Kerala High Court that has asked the state government to bring the temple under a public trust.
The 500-year-old temple, dedicated to Lord Vishnu, is unique in terms of architecture and mythology, with legends of a curse protecting the long-hidden treasure.
While the royal family’s guardianship of the temple’s wealth over close to three centuries has drawn plaudits, critics say the fortune could go far to stimulate Kerala’s local economy and improve living standards in a country with an estimated 450 million people living in poverty. “The royal family had a great tradition of being progressive and it had been an integral part of the history and traditions of the temple. It would not be right to deny them any role in the temple’s affairs,” said Ramesh Chennithala, chief of the Kerala unit of the ruling Congress party.
Read the full story by D Jose here.
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Huge treasure trove discovered under southern Indian Hindu temple
Investigators plan to pry open the final vault hidden deep under a centuries-old Indian Hindu temple as police guarded round the clock the shrine where billions of dollars worth of treasure has been discovered. Over the last week a seven-member team of investigators has broken into five of the six secret subterranean vaults piled high with jewels that have lain untouched for hundreds of years.
Onlookers and devotees thronged the shrine in the bustling centre of Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of India’s southern Kerala state, as officials said treasure worth more than $20 billion had been found — more than India’s education budget. Sacks filled with diamonds were piled next to tonnes of gold coins and jewellery, media reported, in the vaults of the 16th century Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple, the royal chapel of the former rulers of Travancore, now part of Kerala state.
“The current market value of the articles found so far by the committee members would be roughly 900 billion rupees,” one temple official who was not authorised to speak to the media told Reuters. Investigators searched the vaults to draw up an inventory of the riches because of worry about security but they had no idea of the amount of treasure they would find.
“We are ready to protect the temple wealth. We will chart out measures for the permanent security in consultation with the Travancore Royal family, which administers the temple now, and the chief priest of the temple”, state Chief Minister Oommen Chandy told reporters.
Historians supported the estimates of the treasure’s value, noting the lucrative trade routes that passed through the region for many centuries. “Traders, who used to come from other parts of the country and abroad for buying spices and other commodities, used to make handsome offerings to the deity for not only his blessings but also to please the then rulers”, said P.J. Cherian, director of Kerala Council for Historic Research.
Read the full story by D Jose here. See also Treasure trove found in Kerala temple, said to be worth billions.
Indian Supreme Court suspends controversial Ayodhya mosque ruling
India’s Supreme Court has suspended a High Court ruling over the partition of a disputed site that has been a flashpoint for Hindu-Muslim clashes, throwing one of the country’s most religiously-divisive legal battles into uncertainty. A two-justice bench questioned the reasoning behind a ruling passed last year that divided the site of the former Babri Masjid mosque destroyed by Hindu rioters in 1992 into three separate plots for Hindus, Muslims, and a local Hindu trust.
The demolition of the 16th century mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya triggered some of India’s worst riots that killed about 2,000 people. Over 200,000 police were deployed for the September ruling to guard against communal violence.
“This (ruling) is very strange and surprising. Nobody has prayed for partition of the area. The Allahabad High Court has given a new relief which was not sought by anybody,” said Aftab Alam, the presiding judge, on Monday. The two judges ordered that the “status quo” should be maintained at the site, banning either of the groups from beginning construction activities.
Read the full story by Venkat Raman here.
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Nepal Christians threaten ‘corpse’ protest in burial row
Christians in Nepal have threatened to parade corpses in the capital to press the government into finding them alternative burial grounds after burials near the country’s holiest Hindu shrine were banned.
Christians account for less than two percent of Hindu-majority Nepal’s 28 million people. Authorities barred them this month from burying their dead in the forested graveyard at Sleshmantak saying the land belonged to the Pashupatinath Hindu temple, a U.N. heritage site in Kathmandu.
“Burial after death is a fundamental human right and the government is violating this by not giving us any place to bury the dead,” C.B.Gahatraj, a senior official of the Committee for Christian Recommendation for New Constitution told Reuters.
“If we don’t get an alternative burial site we’ll be forced to protest with corpses in front of the Singha Durbar,” Gahatraj said referring to the government complex that houses the prime minister’s office and the parliament.
Mr RajaMadhwa, you don’t understand what you are talking about. It is the forested graveyard not the holiest of holy temple what you are talking about. The word you are using “Christian terrorist”, is not reasonable phrase. The important thing what you dont understand is we are not looking for that particular place for burial but we would accept any other burial place which is convenient. Christian never came in a false name, but they come as a Christian. These Christian are Nepalese and they love Nepal more than you fellas.
100 pilgrims killed in stampede at Hindu festival in India
A stampede sparked by a night-time road accident in dense forest has killed more than 100 Hindu pilgrims in the southern state of Kerala in India. Kerala’s deputy general of police told reporters that 102 people who visited the Sabarimala Temple to offer prayers to the Hindu deity Ayappa had been killed on Friday night. Officials at a Hindu temple estimated the death toll at around 100, Kerala Temple Affairs Minister Ramachandran Kadannappally said by telephone.
Hundreds of thousands had gathered at the hilltop shrine of Sabarimala on Friday evening, the last day of an annual two-month religious festival. A bus carrying pilgrims back to the neighbouring state of Karnataka collided with a jeep and went out of control, crushing people walking nearby, Kadannappally said. Panicked pilgrims rushed forward, triggering a stampede.
“They came down the hillside… this happened primarily because the area was totally dark,” Jacob Punnoose, Kerala Deputy General of Police told Times Now TV channel.
Fifty-two pilgrims were killed in an almost identical stampede at Sabarimala in 1999. An investigation into the deaths found the state government guilty of negligence in ensuring public safety.
U.S. raps Palestinian report on Western Wall
The U.S. State Department has condemned an official Palestinian report last week asserting that Jerusalem’s Western Wall, one of Judaism’s holiest sites, is not Jewish. Al-Mutawakil Taha, deputy information minister in the Palestinian Authority, published a five-page study last week disputing Jews’ reverence of the shrine as a retaining wall of the compound of Biblical Jewish Temples destroyed centuries ago and saying it is a “Muslim wall and an integral part of al-Aqsa mosque and Haram al-Sharif.”
“We strongly condemn these comments and fully reject them as factually incorrect, insensitive and highly provocative,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters on Tuesday. “We have repeatedly raised with the Palestinian Authority leadership the need to consistently combat all forms of delegitimization of Israel, including denying historic Jewish connections to the land,” he added.
The wall is adjacent to a politically sensitive holy complex in a part of Jerusalem that Israel captured in a 1967 war. The area, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, is home to al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock.
Malaysia fines Muslims for brandishing cow’s head in Hindu temple protest
A Malaysian court has sentenced a Muslim to a week in jail and fined 11 others for a brandishing a cow’s head during a protest against the construction of a Hindu temple.
Critics said the light sentences on Tuesday may further strain race relations between Muslims, who make up the majority of the country’s 28 million population, and minority Hindus and Christians who complain of discrimination.
“Going ahead, this will become a political issue for the country’s minorities and further reinforce their unhappiness,” said James Chin, a politics professor at Monash University in Kuala Lumpur.
The 12 were from a group who had marched in August last year with the head of a cow to protest a plan to build a Hindu temple in their mainly Muslim neighbourhood. Hindus, who consider the cow to be a sacred animal, were angered.
Read the full story here and the report from last September when the Muslims were charged.
Report from Tibet: “We believe in Buddhism, Chinese believe in nothing”
Tibet is richer and more developed than it has ever been, its people healthier, more literate, and better dressed and fed. But the bulging supermarkets, snappy new airports and gleaming restored temples of this remote and mountainous region cannot hide broad contradictions and a deep sense of unhappiness among many Tibetans that China is sweeping away their culture.
Beijing has spent freely to bring development to restless Tibet, part of a grand strategy to win over the proudly Buddhist people by improving their standard of living. Lhasa is starting to look like any other middle-tier Chinese city, with the same fast food outlets and mobile phone stores, and the same unimaginative architecture.
Large sums have also gone into restoring monasteries and temples, the centre of life for devoutly Buddhist Tibetans, bolstering government claims that China respects religious rights.
What China has failed to do is address the alienation many Tibetans feel in the face of breakneck economic progress.
“Tibet is a special country and its people are special,” said one middle-aged teacher, speaking quietly in a back room behind a shop in Lhasa’s old quarter, centre of the 2008 riots. “We don’t think about money like Chinese people. We believe in Buddhism, but the Chinese people believe in nothing.”
Japanese monk gets down with the beat for Buddhism
He raps. He chants. And this month, Japan’s famed hip-hop loving monk, better known as MC Happiness, will tap dance on stage, in the name of Buddhism.
Kansho Tagai heads the 400-year-old Kyoouji Temple in central Tokyo, offering softly chanted prayers throughout the day amid traditional bell chimes and wafts of incense.
But once in a while, he raises the volume, and the tempo, of these prayers, going before an audience to rap Buddhist sutra, or teachings, to hip hop beats and in modern Japanese.
“When I listened to rap music for the first time, it was in English so I couldn’t understand a word,” Tagai told Reuters.
“I realised that the same can be said for Buddhist sutras because most people can’t understand a word. And the thing is, listening to rap music makes you feel good even though it may be incomprehensible.”
All of creation is music. And rhythm is your guide. The monk gets it.
Hindus and Muslims worship side-by-side in Uttar Pradesh
News stories about Hindu-Muslim relations in India usually stress strains between followers of the two faiths. Here’s a short Reuters video from our partner ANI on Hindus and Muslims worshipping side by side in a temple and a mazar (mausoleum) in Uttar Pradesh state:
Tell me which religon produces greatest number of crazies?
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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First of all, the report is false in some aspects.
There was no undearthing of treasure-troves.
It was mere opening of the vaults of the temple for an inventory to be preapred under court-order, a rich temple,a temple with a deity who was once the nominal head of the State and on whose behalf the Kings ruled.Offerings are made at temples and in the course of its 2000 year history,the vaults have become quite rich.
Some of the items are used daily for the temple service and hence those vaults are opened daily for the purpose.They themselves are vaulable artifacts,infact the temple idol is itself gold and would we think of valuing it and selling it off through sotheby’s? but they have a sanctity associated with them infact most of the items do,as they were offerings.
Legally all items belong to the temple and the royal family has the custodianship which of course does not mean the right to do away with it.
This is a within-temple matter and the court had ordered the inventory for mere documentation purpose and in order to prevent any mismanagement within the organisation.
There is infact no need for anyone to suggest or demand how the ”spoils” should be divided!