Before 'dwarapalakas', Potty had hauled away Sabarimala's main door; Is Potty poor man's Subhash Kapoor?
The HC has asked the SIT to probe the circumstances that led to Potty getting the contract.
The HC has asked the SIT to probe the circumstances that led to Potty getting the contract.
The HC has asked the SIT to probe the circumstances that led to Potty getting the contract.
Thiruvananthapuram: After the gold-clad copper plates of Sabarimala 'dwarapalakas' were electroplated in Chennai by sponsor Unnikrishnan Potty in late August 2019, their combined weight had dropped by over 4 kg. This had prompted the High Court to seriously consider the possibility of Potty selling the originals for a ransom and replacing them with fakes.
Now, the High Court has found that even before the 'dwarapalakas' were taken out of Sannidhanam, the Travancore Devaswom Board had allowed Potty to replace the shrine's main 'sreekovil' door, covered in gold by Vijay Mallya's company in 1998, with a new one with considerably less gold coating.
It was Potty's 'triumph' with the 'sreekovil' door that emboldened him to seek permission to embellish the 'dwarapalakas' in gold.
Letter bomb
That Potty had gold-plated the main door of the Sreekoval before he had set his sights on the 'dwarapalakas' was revealed in a letter seized by the Special Investigation Team and produced before the High Court on November 5.
With each report submitted before the HC, the SIT is providing new pieces of evidence that the Court hopes would eventually solve the jigsaw puzzle of the Sabarimala gold loot.
The letter the SIT ferreted out from the dust-laden file mountains of the Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB) was the one written by Potty to the executive officer on June 17, 2019.
Potty offers to gold-plate the 'dwarapalakas' and also the copper coverings on the northern and southern corners of the 'sreekovil' under his sponsorship. His qualification: He had gold-plated the door to the 'sreekovil'.
Counterfeit sponsor
This letter led the SIT to a carpenter named Nandan. In January 2019, Potty had brought Nandan to Sannidhanam to take the measurements of the two-panelled main door. Nandan purchased teak from a timber merchant in Thrissur, and transported it to Sree Ramapuram Ayyappa Temple in Bangalore.
There, he created an exact replica of the 'sreekovail' main door on teak. The replica was taken to Sannidhanam and tested. Perfect fit. (The original main door was placed on the hinges in such a way that it could easily be removed for testing the replica, and then put back.)
The teak door replica was then transported to Hyderabad for copper plating, brought back to Sannidhanam, and tried on. Once again, a perfect fit. Then, it was taken to Smart Creations in Chennai for gold-plating. The process was done on March 1 and 2, 2019. The doors were covered in 324 grams of gold.
Profitable rituals
If Potty had kept with him for over a month the gold-clad plates of the 'dwarapalakas' taken from Sannidhanam before reaching it to Smart Creations in Chennai for re-plating, the new gold-clad main door took a while to reach the Sannidhanam from Chennai. Though the gold-plating was completed on March 3, the doors reached Sannidhanam only on March 11.
In between, Potty had used the 'travelling Sreekovil door' to conduct a ritual at Elampally Temple in Kottayam in which a top Malayalam actor and the then TDB president A Padmakumar were present. Implication is that Potty had exploited the devotion of noted figures to fatten his purse.
Where is the original door?
More than what Potty did with the new gold-clad main door, what agitated the HC was the mismatch in the quantity of gold in the original main door and the replacement. The new doors were coated in 324 gms of gold. But in 1998, Vijay Mallya's United Breweries had coated the original one with 2519.760 gms of gold.
Right from the start of the investigation, the Court had been enquiring about the old door. It was eventually found abandoned near the 'ashtabhishekam' counter, exposed to the elements. It is now in the strong room.
The Court has asked the SIT to ascertain whether the main door that the Board now claims is the old one is actually the original. The Court suspects that the TDB officials would have allowed Potty to cart away the original to be sold in the black market.
The original had nearly eight times more gold than the one Potty sponsored; 2519.76 gms to Potty's 324.4 gms.
Poor man's Subhash Kapoor
There is another way in which Potty could have profited. When outsiders like Potty are allowed to make exact replicas, it opens the possibility of them manufacturing fakes of divine objects and selling them in the black market.
"Such replicas, crafted under the guise of temple work, could readily be sold in
international markets at astronomical prices, a well-documented modus operandi of art smugglers and conmen worldwide. This bears disturbing resemblance to the operations of notorious figures like Subhash Kapoor, the international temple-art thief, who similarly exploited religious patronage to loot and traffic priceless heritage objects." the HC said in its November 5 order.
Subhash Kapoor was convicted for stealing 19 idols from Varadaraja Perumal Temple in Tamil Nadu's Ariyalur district worth nearly Rs 100 crore, and illegally exporting them to his Art of the Past Gallery in New York, USA.
The HC has asked the SIT to probe the circumstances that led to Potty getting the contract for the repairs of the main door in the first quarter of 2019, and also to see whether Potty and his network of contacts within the Board had profited from such a transaction.