“I went to the Vatican and I saw that the ceilings were made of gold. And I heard the Pope saying the church takes care of poor children, but if so, sell the ceiling, JP. Do something! I was angry with him. For the same reason I got angry with so many people. Because they are two-faced. Because they say one thing here and then another thing there. Because they stab you in the back. Because they lie.”
That was the comment from the football legend Diego Maradona about his visit to Vatican palace and I remembered this when I read about the ‘honesty’ of the Travancore royal family that the mainstream media is celebrating right now. It was all started when the stock-taking of the Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Trivandrum began by the supreme court order. Everyone is surprised at the amount and value of the wealth that was found inside the secret hideaways inside the temple which comes close to Rs. 1 lakh crore and one more secret vault is yet to be opened. This makes the Padmanabhaswamy Temple the richest temple in India.
Since the matter has become a topic of interest to general public, there are many discussions going on about the royal and ‘divine’ wealth. The wealth that was found in the temple is of the old Travancore royal family. In other words, it is the wealth of the old Travancore princely state and it’s people. In short, it is the people’s money, through taxes and everything, that the old Travancore king had added to the temple and the deity through the process of “thRippaTi daanam“. And through that process, the kingdom of Travancore and it’s wealth was ‘surrendered’ to the deity and the temple. Still, it’s only symbolic and the king continued to be in his position; just that his designation was changed to ‘padmanaabha daasa‘ (meaning, the servant of Lord Padmanabhan), looking after the God’s wealth and kingdom for him.
The thing is, no one would dare question a king like Marthanda Varma who was a conqueror and as was the practice with any king, he would do as he please. The royal family had kept their secrets and this wealth in the name of Sri Padmanabhan, even during the merger of Travancore with Indian Union. Which means, they have denied the right of people to know about their ancestral wealth (which includes the hard-earned and no-so-hard-earned money of their ancestors) even in the march towards a newly built democracy.
As a result, the lakh crores worth of wealth of the people were hidden and useless. Not only that it is useless, now, from what I assume from the news, every tax paying citizen will have to bear the cost of safe-guarding this useless wealth. As per the news reports, one of the royal family members seems to have asked proudly:
“How many royal families in the country can be proud of keeping things like this? You should understand that two chambers out of the six have not been opened for more than 150 years and it there that the treasure trove has been kept safely”.
I would like to tell him that if the royal family was honest as the media and they themselves celebrate to be, they would have spent that wealth for the welfare of people. This is not the hard-earned money of their labor. They once did the mistake of ‘surrendering’ it to a God, then with not surrendering it to Indian Union and now by justifying all those actions. And our slavery mentality celebrates this as an act of honesty.
Now who would tell them what Maradona told the pope?