Scheme Suit Update ― Sridharan

There has been a demand from our readers for an update on the Scheme Suit filed against the Trustees of Sri Aurobindo Ashram in August 2010 by five disciples of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. A Scheme Suit is filed against a public charitable Trust (in this case Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust) when there is a sufficient public cause and grievance, so the plaintiffs have to first ask “leave to sue” from the Court and show prima facie evidence of the grievance. This should not be confused with the admission of cases in general where only individual interests are affected. Admission of cases is usually decided by the judge on the basis of prima facie evidence provided by the plaintiffs, but in a scheme suit, this initial exercise is rendered more difficult by the law giving the public Trust (against whom the scheme suit is filed) a chance to defend itself and disprove the plaintiff’s case at the very outset. The reason for this extra procedure for admission is to discourage the filing of frivolous cases filed against a public institution. The plaintiff has to therefore prove, even before the case is admitted, that his cause of action is sufficiently public in nature, and that not only he but a number of individuals have been affected for which the Trustees are liable for prosecution. That is why a scheme suit is difficult to admit and the very admission of the case can be a protracted process. In the history of Puducherry, the present scheme suit is said to be the first one to get admitted and numbered. One more scheme suit, also filed against the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, is pending for admission right now in the Puducherry Court.

The following are the major landmarks in the movement of the Scheme Suit that concerns us:

1.  The Scheme Suit was filed against the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust in August 2010 by five disciples / plaintiffs.

2.   The Scheme Suit was granted “leave to sue” in February 2011 by the Principal District Judge of Puducherry after hearing out lengthy arguments from both sides.

3.  The Trust then went on appeal in the High Court of Chennai against the order passed by the Principal District Judge of Puducherry, but its petition for not granting “leave to sue” to the five plaintiffs was dismissed in June 2011.

4.  The Trust then took advantage of one loophole in the judgment of June 2011 and again filed a rejection petition in the Puducherry Court to dismiss the scheme suit. This rejection petition was dismissed a second time in October 2012 in Puducherry.

5.   The Trust went again on appeal in the Chennai High Court against the judgment of the lower court in Puducherry. In April 2013, the Chennai High Court finally delivered a judgment in favour of the five plaintiffs. This time the judgment was unambiguously clear on the admission of the suit and with regard to the granting of the “leave to sue”.

6.   There are now two options for the Trust: either to file an appeal for revocation of the suit in the Supreme Court in Delhi or continue with the original suit in Puducherry. If they appeal to the Supreme Court and get dismissed once again, it will be deemed as a black mark on them. On the other hand, if they continue with the case in Puducherry, they will have to immediately confront a petition from the five plaintiffs asking the Court to grant interim relief and appoint a temporary administrator for Sri Aurobindo Ashram until the pendency of the case. It is this that they would want to avoid at all costs.

If there is one thing that can be drawn to the reader’s attention, it is the dilatory tactics of the Trustees of Sri Aurobindo Ashram. A host of impleaders, who are obviously proxies of the Trustees, have been introduced in the scheme suit in order to delay the proceedings. Among them are: Ajit Reddy, Gayatri Mohapatra, Mina Mitra, Anup Kishore Das, Aditya Srivastav,  Kaivalya Shah, Gautam Chatterjee, Arupananda Das, Bhajanananda Palai, Santosh Kumar Nayak, Prashant Kumar Jena, Mahadev Prasad Routray, Harjit Singh Anand & Asok Adityan. Many of the impleaders haven’t even read the Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs and yet they accuse the original plaintiffs of spreading lies about the book and fomenting fundamentalism.

The stand taken in the Court by the Trustees and impleaders with regard to the book is deceptively non-committal, though copiously praising it through the positive reviews of others. These reviewers are either spiritual ignoramuses (though perhaps good in their own profession), or they are personal friends of Peter Heehs or/and the Trustees, and have a clear stake in it. Not one negative review has been produced before the Judge, even though a thousand pages of criticism is readily available on two blogs dedicated to the analysis of the book (thelivesofsriaurobindo.com and mirroroftomorrow.org). As for their own opinion about the book, the Trustees cleverly and “cautiously” reserve it for the future until the Court in Orissa pronounces its final judgment on the book. According to them, the case, which resulted in the banning of the book by the Govt. of Orissa through a gazette notification in April 2009, is still pending! So until that is pending, they will keep their own opinions pending! (This is like waiting for Doomsday!)

Naturally, the Trustees don’t mention that they have dissociated themselves from the book on two occasions, the first through an internal circular dated 08.10.2008 to the departments of the Ashram, and the second through a notice dated 23.09.2010 displayed on the Ashram notice board for a few days only. Why this duplicity with regard to their stand? Because if the Trustees tell the Court that they have dissociated themselves from the book, then the scheme suit will gain in strength and the public cause will be easy to establish. On the other hand, if the Trustees say that the book is excellent and laudable, then they have a problem with the Gazette notification which has proscribed the book. They will also have problems with thousands of shocked disciples, who will wonder why on earth the Trustees are supporting a book which denigrates Sri Aurobindo. That is why the Trustees have taken a pretentiously non-committal stand in the Court!

The Trustees have questioned the credentials of the five plaintiffs, saying that they have filed the scheme suit because of personal grudges. The accusation, though silly in itself, is important for the defence of the Trustees in order to disprove the public nature of the suit. As I have explained earlier, it is only when there is a sufficient public cause that a scheme suit is admitted in the Court. A scheme suit cannot be filed on the basis of private complaints which affect only the litigants, even if they are legitimate. But the so-called personal grievances of the five plaintiffs as enumerated by the Trustees are ridiculous, to the extent of being laughable.

The Trustees have also questioned the authenticity of the signature campaign that took place in October 2008 demanding Peter Heehs’s removal from the Archives. Everybody in the Ashram, including the Trustees, know too well that such a signature campaign was unprecedented in the history of the Ashram and shook the entire Ashram community. The petition was first signed by the late Pranab Kumar Bhattacharya and around 500 signatories followed suit. But the Trustees have nevertheless denied its authenticity because the original petition was handed over to them, and the plaintiffs have only a xerox copy of it. This is how the Trustees take technical advantage in the Court.

Another silly argument of the Trustees is how could the devotees and disciples react negatively to the book when the book itself was not available in India. The book was stayed in India shortly before its intended publication by Penguin Publishers in November 2008, and banned four months afterwards by the Orissa Govt. in April 2009. But the book was already published in the U.S.A. in June 2008 by the Columbia University Press. Copies of the book were brought to India immediately after its release. A set of highly objectionable extracts from the book was compiled by an Archives colleague of Peter Heehs. These extracts were posted on the Net from where they got rapidly disseminated to all parts of the world, thanks to modern technology. Devotees and disciples of Sri Aurobindo all over the world were deeply outraged upon reading them, all the more so when there was no public condemnation of the book forthcoming from the Ashram Trustees. So the devotees had read the objectionable parts of the book before the book was banned in April 2009. In fact, it was because they read them and were deeply outraged by its denigration of Sri Aurobindo that the book was banned by the Orissa Govt. Thousands of letters were written during this period and lakhs of signatures were collected in order to persuade the Govt of Orissa to proscribe the book. This fortunately happened, and it should certainly be attributed to the action of a higher force, notwithstanding all the pseudo-secular talk of not banning books.

That the selected extracts of the book were decontextualised in order to whip up public emotion is another argument of the Trustees in defence of the book. This argument was first introduced by Peter Heehs himself, and he even attempted to recontextualise the extracts that had destroyed his credibility, but he could hardly convince anybody. The extracts remained as objectionable as they were before he touched them up. They were after all passages from his book and wouldn’t change no matter how he presented them.

I will end with a very important argument used by the Trustees in order to defend Peter Heehs’s book – that of Sri Aurobindo Ashram not being a religious institution. Religion has become a bad word in the current world situation because of its association with terrorism, so it is very fashionable to decry it. It is true that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother made a clear distinction between spirituality and religion and said that they did not want to start a new religion. But the distinction is irrelevant in the present crisis of the Ashram. Actually the word “religious” has been cleverly used by the Trustees to counteract the insulting of “religious beliefs”, a phrase in the Gazette notification of the Orissa Govt. proscribing the book. But in the present context, it would not make any difference if the term “religious beliefs” is replaced by “spiritual beliefs” because denigration of the founder of the institution – be it religious, spiritual or even secular – would remain equally reprehensible in all three cases. Accepting a virulent attack on the founder of the institution by the Trustees – be it a religious, spiritual or secular institution – on the basis of freedom of speech or universal tolerance would certainly invite legitimate censure and reprobation, because it is the duty of the Trustees to protect the public image of the founder, especially within the framework of the institution. After all, what are the Trustees meant for if not to protect and fulfil the interest, aims and ideals of the founders of the institution!

The anti-religious position of the Trustees also implies that they would like to treat Sri Aurobindo on par with other spiritual or unspiritual leaders within Sri Aurobindo Ashram, because they do not want to be religious about him (as instructed by Sri Aurobindo himself!). This is not only absurd, but foolish and a too literal interpretation of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s words of which the Trust is taking legal advantage because circumstances and their own double standards have pushed it into a tight corner. The real meaning of Sri Aurobindo’s words is not difficult to understand: Religion is a deterioration of spirituality; it is a hardening of the spontaneous spiritual forms into mechanical rituals and conventions with very little or no meaning at all as time passes. It is this rigidity that we have to avoid, and the fanaticism and exclusivism that accompany it. But surely this cannot be taken as a justification to insult Sri Aurobindo in public and denigrate him in his own Ashram. For it is one thing to go hammer and tongs after an enemy who shouts insults at your Guru from a distance, in which case the outrage you feel can be contained with equanimity and good civic sense. But it is another to swallow slow poison in one’s own house, even if you leave it to the choice of the consumers who may knowingly or unknowingly fall prey to it. Are we not then supposed as responsible householders (in this case the Trustees) to safeguard our own interests, warn the others of the dangers of slow poison and make them sufficiently aware so that they make a conscious and healthy choice?

When the Trustees obstinately refused to take any action with regard to Peter Heehs and his mischievous book on Sri Aurobindo, it was indeed like a psychological poison being introduced in the clean and spiritual atmosphere of the Ashram. The disciples were shocked and deeply aggrieved and the accusation of “breach of trust” was bound to come from them sooner or later when all their persuasive methods to convince the Trustees failed. Then there was no other course left except taking the Trustees to task and to file a scheme suit against them in the Puducherry Court. Of course, one earnestly wishes that this could have been avoided, but the one all-important question that the five plaintiffs had to face, and the answer to which made them file the scheme suit without any hesitation was, “If you have to make a choice, what would you choose to stand for, Sri Aurobindo or Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust (as represented now by the administration of the present Trustees)?” The plaintiffs naturally chose the former! I wish the rest of the Ashram community had the courage to do the same!