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SC confirms Travancore royal family’s rights in running of Kerala temple
The Supreme Court (SC) on Monday upheld the rights of the Travancore royal family over the Padmanabhaswamy temple at Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, putting an end to the 11-year-old litigation.
The Supreme Court (SC) on Monday upheld the rights of the Travancore royal family over the Padmanabhaswamy temple at Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, putting an end to the 11-year-old litigation.
A two-member SC bench, headed by Justices UU Lalit and Indu Malhotra, allowed the appeal filed by the king of the Travancore royal family challenging a 2011 Kerala high court (HC) judgment that had given the rights over the temple to the Kerala government.
The court held that the Shebaitship -- the right to maintain and manage the temple and the deity -- of the royal family over the shrine would not come to an end with the death of the ruler in 1991, who had signed the instrument of accession with the Indian government by which the erstwhile princely state of Travancore had merged with the Indian Union.
The court ordered that for now, an administrative committee with the district judge of Thiruvananthapuram, as its chairperson, would manage the shrine’s daily administration.
The temple had come under media glare when the apex court in 2011 had ordered an inventory of the temple and its properties. This led to the opening of five of the six vaults of the temple, leading to the discovery of treasure trove valued at around ₹90,000 crore.
One of the vaults, vault B, was not opened and it was later put on hold by the court.
Now, the administrative committee will decide whether vault B should be opened.
The temple was under the management of a trust headed by the king of the royal family, when a public interest litigation (PIL) was filed in 2009 in Kerala HC by a former Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, TP Sundara Rajan, praying that its control should be handed over to the Kerala government.
This petition was entertained by the Kerala HC, which had held in January 2011 that after Chithira Thirunal Balaverma, the ruler, who signed agreement of the accession with the Indian government, passed away in 1991, the temple would stand vested with the Kerala government.
The royal family then moved the SC, which, in 2014, constituted an administrative committee to manage the temple in the interim.
In August 2012, senior advocate Gopal Subramanium was appointed amicus curiae (friend of the court) by the SC.
Subramanium submitted a voluminous report before the court in April 2014, alleging serious mismanagement of the temple by the trust and indicting the royal family on various counts.
The court after accepting the report set up an administrative committee on April 24, 2014, to manage the temple in the interim and also ordered a special audit of the temple and its properties by Vinod Rai, the former Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India.
