Politicising the laddu: The Hindu Editorial on the Tirupati laddu and its ‘adulteration’

On the face of it, the allegations are rather serious — the adulteration of ghee (clarified butter) — used in the making of Tirupati’s famed laddu prasadam — with ‘foreign fat’. The charges were made by no less than Telugu Desam Party (TDP) leader and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu himself, and his son and Minister Nara Lokesh, on September 18, against his predecessor and Leader of the Opposition, Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy of the Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party (YSRCP). Since then, the issue has snowballed into a free-for-all, with leaders of Mr. Naidu’s central alliance partner, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), seeking an ‘independent investigation’. Former BJP MP Subramanian Swamy has even sought a Supreme Court-monitored probe. Unsurprisingly, as The Hindu has reported, the adulteration charges do not seem to have deterred devotees from making the arduous journey to the hilltop temple, nor has it slowed down the sale of the laddus. The timing of these charges, close to State elections, where the BJP faces tough challenges to retain power in Haryana and Maharashtra, raises concerns of their being politically motivated, and indeed irresponsible, having been made by a constitutional authority of Andhra Pradesh.

In the quality test by the Centre for Analysis and Learning in Livestock and Food (CALF), in Anand, Gujarat (National Dairy Development Board affiliated) the laddu samples were received on July 9, and the results submitted on July 16. But Mr. Naidu announced its findings in September. Moreover, the analysis mentions a range of what it considers to be ‘foreign fat’ — from soybean, olive, sunflower, rapeseed, and cotton seed, to fish oil, palm oil and beef tallow and lard. The extent of the contamination (‘foreign fat’) in the ghee which was sent by the Tamil Nadu-based supplier A.R. Dairy in Dindigul, is unclear. The CALF has also added an array of caveats. The apex body for food quality checks is the Ghaziabad-based National Food Laboratory (NFL). So, why did the State government not send the samples to the NFL for final verification? It is to be noted that on July 29, an executive officer of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) had said that A.R. Dairy would be blacklisted as its samples had contaminants beyond ‘vegetable oil’. In the wake of this controversy, the argument from the Hindutva right to remove temple administration, including the TTD, from the state’s purview and return it to ‘hereditary custodians’, is opportunistic and faulty, as the Supreme Court has upheld the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments laws across States. An issue that must be limited to quality control should not be allowed to metamorphose into one of communal muck-raking.