TN opposes Kanchi seer's plea for bail

The Tamil Nadu government today insisted that there was enough evidence to prosecute the Kanchi Shankaracharya for murder and conspiracy and opposed his bail application, which was earlier rejected by the Madras High Court.

The apex court Bench, headed by Chief Justice R C Lahoti, will continue the hearing tomorrow as the pontiff's counsel wanted to reply to the state's arguments opposing his appeal.

The state counsel, KTS Tulsi, began the arguments by handing over in sealed cover the investigation documents, which were sought by the court during the hearing on December 17.

But Shankaracharya's senior counsel FS Nariman intervened and submitted that the issue could be decided without going through the documents.

He tried to demolish the prosecution story that money was withdrawn from the ICICI Bank to pay the hired killers of Sankararaman.

Even on basic facts on this allegation, the state police was changing its stand, he said. First, the police claimed that Rs 50 lakh was withdrawn from the bank branch at the mutt to pay the assailants.

When the mutt pointed out that there was no such withdrawal, the police claimed that the money was received from a land sale agreement.

The cash was kept in the seer's room from April till September, when the murder was committed. According to Tulsi, the account was fabricated and tampered with and investigation was still on into this aspect.

When Tulsi began arguments for the state, the three-judge Bench told him to produce the specific pieces of evidence against the seer.

They asked him to pinpoint the evidence with regard to the motive for the murder and the conspiracy aspect. Tulsi submitted that there were 39 letters, which showed that Sankararaman had objected to the functioning of the mutt.

The earlier letters referred to financial irregularities and the latter ones introduced the immoral aspects. Counsel said those allegations had become a sore point with the pontiff. He underlined that Shankara-charya alone had the motive to kill Sankararaman, who was exposing him and the mutt.

Coming to the legal aspects, which took up most of the day, Tulsi emphasised that bail could not be granted when a person is accused of offences, which attracted life sentence or death sentence. He cited the Supreme Court judgment in the Pappu Yadav case to press this point.

The judges observed that the Pappu Yadav case, like all bail applications, was decided on the facts of that case and, therefore, it could not be applied in this case.

Tulsi noted that some witnesses had changed their stand and if the seer was released on bail now, others would not be able to depose against him. He said that if the Tamil Nadu police had failed to arrest Shankaracharya, the seer would have flown to a foreign country as such a plan was in place.

Tulsi also explained the "fake surrender" by persons to distract the attention of the police in the murder and how those persons were paid for the job.

Requesting the court not to go deep into the evidence collected by the police so far, Tulsi said it was too premature to weigh the evidence as the chargesheet in the case had not yet been filed.