Sacrilege – An offence against millions

Belief guides humans. Those who do not believe in a higher power are grossly outnumbered by those who believe in such a power. A philosopher may say that this higher power is an impersonal entity but most of us visualise it as a person. We submit ourselves to a code of morality allegedly given by that god, just like we submit to a government. Any transgression of the code is sacrilege.

Having visualised a personal god, the scriptures have prescribed elaborate rituals to invoke the divine into the idol. There is a philosophical significance in the construction of different parts of the temple complex. Ancient temples are places of pilgrimage for people all over the country. The places are further sanctified by the tapas of hundreds of holy men and sages who visited the shrines throughout centuries.

Scriptures have also devised procedures called upacharas, such as bathing the deities every day with a special mix of liquids (milk, curd, ghee, honey and coconut waters), offering clothes, offering flowers, traditional perfumes, carefully prepared food, and such. The texts say that though the deities do not eat the food, they are satisfied by merely looking at the offering. In other words, they see the degree of devotion. The food is prepared by the devotee with all care and devotion in his own house, and one’s conscience is the witness. Conscience tells us that offering the costliest pizza to the deity is transgression and show of laziness.

Transgression at the individual level is in the form of negligence, and it is a sacrilege for which the individual has to do penance. If transgression is at a collective level, a level in which the devotion and personal habits of millions of people are involved, in a shrine such as Tirumala, the sacrilege is not merely at the individual level but at a collective level. For instance, the food that is offered is technically called naivedyam and when we take it back it is called prasadam, which literally means ‘the grace and blessing of the deity’. The food habits of devotees are different. People who expect beef as prasadam do not go to a place of worship where it is prohibited. Those who eschew all types of meat take the prasadam at Tirumala in addition to those who may take meat. Those who handle the food chain should see that the material procured does not affect the personal beliefs and food habits of the devotees. In this case, unfortunately, gross negligence seems apparent in procuring the items to prepare the offering. Consequently, it becomes an offence against millions of devotees and their food habits.

In olden days people used to undertake personal acts of penance such as burning tongues with the holy kusha grass, or fasting for long periods, and so on. Our texts on dharma describe scores of such penances. In a case like the present one in Tirumala, the position of devotees is that they stand cheated. They ate food which they would not dream of eating consciously. The establishment was obviously trying to cut costs because a good portion of the money offered by the devotees must go to the revenues of the government. It is thus a vicious circle in which the government is also guilty of snatching the money given by people. People give money to God, not to the government. Promoting dharma would be the proper way to use it. Probably the supply chain was callous to entrust the pious job of supplying the right material to people who have the least fear about the sacrilege they were committing.

There are two aspects – punishment and penance. Punishment is to the persons who defiled the sanctity of the temple. Penance is for the revenue department to squeeze less from the temple and leave more for propagation of dharma, for printing books of better quality and so on. This is like a householder allowing more milk to the calf (dharma) and taking some for himself. The extra-secular management cannot entrust certain tasks to faithless persons. Lord Venkateswara has his own way of forgiving people for a long time, like we see Krishna counting the offences of Sisupala in the Mahabharata, but he acts when people are incurable.

(The writer is a former

DGP, Andhra Pradesh)