Tirupati laddu: A famed holy sweet in an unsavoury row in India

India’s most popular nice- the responses- is caught in an unpleasant row.

The controversy erupted last week when Andhra Pradesh’s deputy minister N Chandrababu Naidu claimed that test reports had revealed that the state’s famous Tirupati temple’s daily offerings to the deity were contaminated with animal and vegetable fats.

He said the ghee ( clarified butter ) used in the sweets was adulterated with “beef tallow, fish oil and other impurities”. Temple products in India are generally vegetarian.

On the face of it, it appeared like a matter of food adulteration – something that authorities in India routinely grapple with.

But since Naidu’s news, the problem has dominated stories, caused a big political column and prompted another temples to check their chocolates for “purity”.

The Tirupati temple in Andhra Pradesh is one of Hinduism’s most spiritual sanctuaries. The church, which is dedicated to the Hindu god Sri Venkateswara and is also known as Balaji, has assets worth tens of billions of dollars and draws roughly 24 million followers from India and abroad each year.

Believers value the famed Tirupati laddus, which are prepared in “pure cattle ghee” using gram flour, sugar, walnuts, almonds, and cloves, and then brought back house to share with family and friends. Studies say more than 350, 000 laddus are prepared regularly in the cathedral’s home.

Therefore, many religious officials are calling on government to protect the purity of temples, and Naidu’s disclosures have been met with shock.

” Care should be taken that such great crimes are never repeated in a church that has tens of millions of believers”, Ramana Deekshitulu, a pastor, told media company ANI.

Swami Avimukteshwaranand Saraswati, another important priest, called it” an assault on the faith and belief of tens of millions of Hindus”.

This is a great betrayal of Hindus and an organized crime. He said in a news release that it should be looked into and that rigid punishment should be taken against the guilty.

After Naidu’s accusation of “desecration,” his adversary and former chief minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy became a democratic slugfest.

Naidu, who was sworn in as the country’s main minister in June, alleged that the dirty laddus were distributed to believers during Reddy’s name. The church board is run by the state state, which appoints its commander.

Naidu claimed to have changed the honey vendor and that he had established a special analysis team led by a senior police officer to deal with the issue.

Reddy, who is furious, has refuted the claims and accused Naidu of playing elections. In a strongly-worded notice to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he asked him to” greatly reprimand” Naidu, who’s a vital ally in Modi’s national government.

According to him,” Naidu is a compulsive and habitual phony” who was using false efforts to tarnish the reputation of the church confidence.

Reddy claimed that there had been instances when ghee tankers were sent back to suppliers even though the church did not have a test to verify the ghee’s beauty, and that even though the church did not have a test to assess the ghee’s beauty, it was because its officials were trained to determine impurities by look and smell.

Reddy’s party has also offered to host spiritual vigils in state temples to “atone for the evil” that Naidu, according to them, has committed by fabricating allegations against the laddus.

Meanwhile, the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams ( TTD ) – the board that manages the nearly 2, 000-year-old temple- has been trying to do damage control.

A table representative confirmed to reporters that the company had engaged in tenders to source honey from five companies. They sent tests for laboratory testing after receiving concerns from travellers and responses producers, which revealed that four tankers from Mr Dairy in Tamil Nadu were of subpar value.

In response, AR Dairy, which has been producing ghee since 1998 and claims to conduct 102 quality checks on its milk, dismissed the allegations as “absurd” and stated that they are “severely damaging to our business.”

The allegations that fish oil was added were “nonsensical,” according to a quality control officer at the company, because “any form of adulteration would immediately be noticed by its odour.”

The temple, meanwhile, said it had done its own penance. To assure devotees that its laddus were now rid of defects and fit for gods and humans, the priests held a four-hour-long “purification ritual” on Monday.

Photographs released by the temple board showed priests sprinkling holy water in the kitchen, on sacks of ingredients and on huge trays of laddus.

The controversy, however, refuses to die down and has dominated headlines in the state. The adulteration was referred to as an “awkward attack on Hindu religion” by prominent actor and state deputy chief minister Pawan Kalyan. In order to make up for the “great injustice,” Kalyan is also carrying out what he called 11 days of atonement rituals.

Members of a Hindu nationalist group have demonstrated outside Reddy’s home, chanting slogans. After painting the walls and gates saffron, which is the color of the BJP and other Hindu parties ‘ flags, the two people left.

Authorities in other states have been rushing to test the sweets sold at other Hindu temples, including the renowned Jagannath temple in Odisha state and the famous Krishna temple in Mathura, Uttar Pradesh.

The issue has also gained traction on social media. Laddu, along with hashtags such as# TirupatiLaddu,# TirupatiLadduControversy and# TirupatiLadduRow, has trended for days on X ( formerly Twitter ), with many expressing their outrage at what they called deliberate attempts to hurt Hindu faith.

However, some of this outrage appeared to have been manufactured when it was discovered that many supporters of Hindu nationalist organizations had shared images of Reddy wearing a Muslim skullcap and hailed him as “anti-Hindu.”

One tweet, shared by many handles two days after Naidu’s allegation, was especially flagged for using identical words by people who appeared unrelated. It said:” For the past 2-3 years, Amma]mother ] used to fall sick if she tasted Tirupati laddus and used to tell us not to eat too much of it. We put it on her general paranoia. I now sense that she was experiencing a terrible mistake.