NEW DELHI, 23 November 2004 — A delegation of top Hindu religious leaders yesterday met with President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and demanded his intervention to secure the release of Jayendra Saraswathi, one of India’s top priests who is in police custody for his alleged involvement in the murder of a temple official.
The 18-member delegation, which included Vishwa Hindu Parishad leaders Ashok Singhal and Vishnu Hari Dalmia, also demanded a “fair and impartial” inquiry into the case by the Central Bureau of Investigation and shifting of the case outside Tamil Nadu, the southern state where the Shankaracharya is currently being interrogated by police.
“We requested the president to intervene in the matter personally and direct the government to secure the immediate release of the seer,” Mahant Gyan Das, head of the Akhara Parishad, an umbrella organization of religious leaders, told reporters here after emerging from the 15-minute meeting with president.
The Hindu leaders’ meeting with the president came as police detained about 300 hard-line Hindus after they damaged buses and forced shops to shut down in a nation-wide strike to protest against the arrest.
Sporadic violence was reported from several towns and cities across the country as members of the VHP and Bajrang Dal took to the streets demanding the release of Saraswathi. Activists belonging to the two groups also ransacked shops, hurled stones at state-run buses and stopped traffic.
“Our religious leader is innocent. We will continue to protest until he is set free,” said Vyankatesh Abdeo, a senior leader of the VHP, which has called the strike with the support of its ally, the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
While most government and private offices remained open in New Delhi and Bombay, the country’s financial hub, some schools and colleges were closed due to fears that there may be trouble. In Gujarat, VHP activists set fire to a bus and broke windows of some offices which refused to shutdown. Mobs attacked a petrol station in the central state of Madhya Pradesh.
Both Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh are ruled by the BJP.
In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, protesters blocked roads, deflated tires of vehicles and hurled stones at more than one dozen buses parked at a terminal.
Saraswathi, who heads a monastery in the southern town of Kanchipuram, was arrested after temple official Sankararaman, said to be a bitter critic of his, was knifed and hacked to death on Sept. 3.
The arrest of the 60-year-old religious leader provoked outrage among hard-line groups such as the VHP as well as the BJP.
