Kesavananda Bharati: The Seer Who Dared

Kesavananda Bharati of Edneer Mutt will always be remembered as the seer who threw a legal challenge to limit the power of Parliament to amend the Constitution. But for the people who knew him before the legal challenge catapulted him to fame say he was a man of surpassing intellect, talent and influence. Decades after the event, the seer recalled that he was in his twenties or thirties when the land reform law in Kerala led to the expropriation of the mutt’s property.

Karthyani Nambiar, a former Kerala government official, remembers watching him with great admiration when she was a Class 10 student. He had come on his annual visit to the Trichambaram Sree Krishna Temple in Taliparamba region of Kannur district. Nambiar is a member of the Vengapurathu family which has a home next to the iconic temple and the Swami had come from neighbouring Kasaragod, the seat of the monastic order of which he was the head since 1961. He was just 21 when he assumed the position. Having become a monk at 19, he was known as Edneer Swamiji and belonged to the parampara (lineage) of Thotakacharya, one of Adi Shankara’s four disciples. This is the reason why he was bestowed with an honorific title and name, a rather long one: Srimad Jagadguru Sri Sri Sankaracharya Thotakacharya Sri Keshavananda Bharathi Sripadangalavaru.

Nambiar, who looks up to him as a god-like figure, recalls Bharati’s rendition of classical music, Carnatic as well as Hindustani, on his customary visits to the Trichambaram temple. He spoke multiple languages, including Malayalam and Kannada, and often spoke about manushwathwam (humanity) in his brief speeches to devotees. It was only over the last few years that he stopped visiting the temple during the annual festival, Nambiar says, adding that it was due to poor health. “In his prime and even as he aged, his spiritual composure and benign presence was what everyone looked forward to on the 22nd day of every kumbham [Malayalam month], which usually fell in March of the year,” she says, adding that she feels a void now that he “has attained Samadhi”.

Regular visitors to the mutt state that Bharati was a man of music who tirelessly promoted culture and the arts besides education. He was a versatile vocalist in his own right and on many auspicious occasions, he would sing at the mutt and also at the Trichambaram Sree Krishna Temple. Krishnan Nair, a Kannur-resident and a regular at the Taliparamba temple, says the last time he heard the guru sing was in 2016 when he rendered a song in the Nattai raga. “I still remember it. He sang Mahaganapathim… on March 16th, 2016. It was a cleansing experience all the time I have watched him sing,” he notes, emphasising that he was very much involved in Yakshagana, a traditional Indian theatre form that is popular in southern Karnataka. “My favourite among the songs he used to sing in the concerts he organised was the one in Malayalam, ‘Kayambu varna thamarakanna’. There are recorded versions, but we will never get to see him sing again,” Nair says.

People close to the mutt—which runs colleges, schools and agricultural farms—tell Open that Swamiji used to write, compose music and sing devotional songs in several languages, including Kannada, Tulu, Malayalam, Hindi, Marathi and Sanskrit. Devotional songs by him are especially popular in the northern part of Kerala and southern Karnataka. He was also fond of drama and used to write and direct plays and skits. “He was a musician, peacenik, philanthropist, all rolled into one,” a government officer posted in Kasaragod tells Open. “Of course, he is famous for the case, but most people, even most of his critics, unfortunately, don’t know that he was also a person with immense talent and kindness,” he avers.

TRAINED TO LEAD a spiritual life, the seer found himself in a very different world barely nine years after he was appointed as pontiff of the Edneer Mutt. In 1957, a communist government had assumed power in Kerala. On top of its list of priorities was the issue of land reform. Through a turbulent decade, during which legislation was framed, passed, weakened and governments and President’s rule alternated with regular frequency, the mutt remained a serene place of learning and contemplation. That was until 1969 when redistributive politics caught up with it.

In an interview to the legal website Bar&Bench in 2012, the seer recalled: “We lost all our property. Prior to the enactment of the law, we had enough revenue from the property and could run the mutt without any difficulty and also do various charitable activities. However, now, we don’t have enough money to run the institution and have to depend upon donations. Our income has [been] reduced considerably and our expenses have increased very much.”

The law that he referred to was the Kerala Land Reforms (Amendment) Act, 1969, a piece of legislation the communist government considered essential to give teeth to a ‘watered-down’ law that had been passed by the state Assembly earlier. But opinion on the matter differed and one observer called it “perhaps the most drastic of any [land reform legislation] passed by any state legislature in India”.

The legislation was designed to provide security of tenure to tenants of lands held by landlords; to give an option to homestead tenants (known as kudikidappukar) to own small patches of land and, lastly, acquire and redistribute ‘surplus’ land. The mutt’s landholdings fell afoul of the third aspect of the law.

THE CULMINATION of the seer’s efforts to prevent the alienation of the Edneer Mutt’s land led to a very different result. He lost his fight to save his mutt’s property as the Supreme Court upheld the validity of the 29th Amendment to the Constitution that expressly protected the land reform laws passed by the Kerala Legislative Assembly. In the same interview to Bar & Bench, the pontiff said: “I didn’t feel much, because I am not an emotional person. I believe that it was all God’s decision. After all, the property is not mine, it all belongs to the mutt and I am only someone who is managing it. So the loss or the gain is actually the mutt’s. I am a neutral person, only a servant of God.”

While he did not get the relief that he sought, his litigation bequeathed something far more precious to the country: limiting the power of Parliament to amend the Constitution. What was happening in Kerala in those years was being replicated across different states of the country. In the garb of implementing measures for social justice, including land reforms, freedoms promised in the original—1949—Constitution were being whittled down. The process started in the Jawaharlal Nehru years but acquired an ominous dimension during the prime ministership of Indira Gandhi. In a series of constitutional amendments—24th (1971), 25th (1971), 26th (1971) and 29th (1972)—the Indira Gandhi Government acquired the means to override Supreme Court judgments in certain cases, along with doing away with promises made to former rulers (in the matter of privy purses) and keeping ironclad land reform laws from any judicial scrutiny. There was a very strong element of economic populism in these changes. But beyond that, tilting the balance in favour of the Directive Principles—which are important constitutional promises—against Fundamental Rights had begun to threaten democracy itself.

Beginning with a case from Punjab in 1967 (Golak Nath) and culminating in Kesavananda (1973), the Supreme Court began to arrest the erosion of Part III of the Constitution. In Kesavananda, the dial went much further and the court enunciated the theory of implied limitations to the power of Parliament to amend the Constitution. This was the famous ‘Basic Features’ doctrine. Pulled out like a rabbit from a hat, it had multiple effects. For one, the court became the last word on virtually any and every amendment to the Constitution, something that was never envisaged by the framers of the document. For another, it opened the door for judicial activism in domains that were, until then, closed to the court. The full effect of this momentous decision was to be felt two decades later when the court acquired quasi-political power and began intervention in matters that were originally the executive’s concern. One can safely say it was the most important judgment in India in the second half of the 20th century.

The concerns highlighted in the judgment—overweening power of an elected government and the use of Parliament to override ‘inconvenient’ parts of the Constitution—were peculiar to that decade. This was due to a complicated set of circumstances but also, in no small part, the ambitions of a government that wanted to short-circuit its way to political goals. Bank nationalisation, land reforms, ending of privy purses and other steps went far beyond mere social justice, as it is understood these days.

In the 1970s and 1980s—and perhaps even sometime later—the court appeared to be the saviour of democracy in India. But after three decades of fractured parliamentary mandates, unwieldy coalitions and weak governments, 1970s-style rewriting of the Constitution via blockbuster amendments was merely a bad memory.

THE SEER IS no longer around and his mellifluous voice is gone forever. Three years later, it will be five decades since the judgment that bears his name was delivered. In these years, much like a full revolution of the dharmachakra, India, too, has moved away from a threat of constitutional degradation, the acquisition of great powers by the judiciary and its realisation of their excessive use. India is now reverting to a normal institutional balance among the different pillars of the state. It is hard to deny that the role played by the seer in India’s constitutional history was a quirk of fate. One could say that it was only a matter of time before someone challenged the erosion of the original Constitution. In fact, Bharati’s lawyer, Nani Palkhivala, saw a chance in his travails to try and stop what was happening. What was admirable was his quality of equanimity after his mutt lost its property. Unlike the godmen of today who hanker after property much more than they care about spiritual salvation, the seer of Edneer Mutt bore everything peacefully. There are few who can match his accomplishments in these shallower times.

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