Leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) staged a demonstration across the State, protesting against the now-stalled move to sell off temple lands. They also demanded that a specific policy be put in place for handling such proposals in the future.
Referring to the release of a Government Order keeping the decision in abeyance, the BJP State office-bearer and ‘Prabhari’ Jally Madhusudhan claimed that the BJP, through its continued fight and agitations, had succeeded in safeguarding temple lands from the State Government ‘for now’. He demanded that a specific policy be brought to safeguard such lands, in the likelihood of successive governments nurturing such ‘malafide’ intentions to sell away temple properties. Mr. Madhusudhan also demanded that the Simhachalam temple lands be recovered from the clutches of the encroachers and those behind it be punished.
In a separate demonstration, BJP State secretary G. Bhanuprakash Reddy attributed such moves to the gaping holes in the legal system and the scope for misinterpretation of law. He demanded the TTD trust board to take up the issue for comprehensive discussion at its forthcoming meeting slated for Thursday. “There is no proper record on the precious landed property, gold ornaments and other forms of valuables gifted by emperors in the past and as such we demand the government to release a white paper on the same”, he said. District General Secretary Ponaganti Bhaskar and others took part.
At Srikalahasti, state Secretary Kola Anand Kumar, flayed the state government and wondered who gave it the right to sell off donated properties ‘at will’. He saw a ‘continued onslaught’ on the temples and Hindu institutions by the successive TDP and YSRC governments in the state. “After Simhachalam land encroachment and Srisailam ticket scam, this is the third in the sequence. They are not disjointed events, but part of a larger pattern”, he observed.
