Famous sacred candy in unsavory row in India

India’s most popular dessert, laddu, is caught in an unsavory row.

The controversy erupted last week when Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu said laboratory reports had shown that laddus offered to the deity and then distributed daily to devotees at the famous Tirupati temple in state, were contaminated with animal and vegetable fat.

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

At first glance, it looked like a matter of food adulteration – which is what Indian authorities have said. regularly struggle with.

But since Naidu’s announcement, the issue has made headlines, caused a major political row and prompted other temples to test the “purity” of their treats.

The Tirupati Temple in Andhra Pradesh is one of the holiest shrines in Hinduism. Dedicated to the Hindu god Sri Venkateswara – popularly known as Balaji – the temple has assets worth tens of billions of dollars and attracts nearly 24 million devotees from India and abroad every year.

Tirupati’s famous laddus – made from gram flour, sugar, cashew nuts, raisins and cardamom and cooked in “pure cow ghee” – are prized by devotees who consider them a blessing of God and take them home to share with family and friends. Reports indicate that more than 350,000 laddus are prepared daily in the temple kitchen.

Naidu’s revelations were therefore met with dismay, with many religious leaders calling on authorities to protect the sanctity of temples.

“We must ensure that such serious sins are not repeated in a temple with tens of millions of devotees,” Ramana Deekshitulu, a priest, told news agency ANI.

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

“This is organized crime and a huge betrayal of Hindus. This matter must be investigated and strict action taken against the culprits,” he told a news channel.

The issue also turned into a political tussle after Naidu blamed his rival and former chief minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy for the “defilement”.

Naidu, who was sworn in as the state’s chief minister in June, alleged that impure laddus were distributed to devotees during Reddy’s tenure. The temple council is headed by the state government, which appoints its head.

Naidu said he had changed ghee suppliers and formed a special investigation team headed by a senior police officer to resolve the issue.

An angry Reddy dismissed the allegations and accused Naidu of playing politics. In a strongly worded letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he asked him to “severely reprimand” Naidu, who is a key ally of Modi’s federal government.

“Naidu is a pathological and habitual liar” who was tarnishing the image of the temple trust with false campaigns, he wrote.

Reddy said that although the temple did not have a laboratory to check the purity of ghee, its officials were experienced in identifying impurities by their appearance and smell and that there had been cases – at the times during his government and also earlier when Naidu’s party was in power – when the ghee tankers were returned to the suppliers.

Reddy’s party has also invited people to participate in religious rituals at temples across the state to “atone for the sin” that, they say, Naidu committed by making allegations about laddus.

Meanwhile, the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) – the board of trustees that manages the nearly 2,000-year-old temple – is working to limit the damage.

A board spokesperson told reporters that they were sourcing ghee from five companies through tenders. Following complaints from pilgrims and laddu makers, they sent samples for laboratory tests which found four tankers of AR Dairy in Tamil Nadu to be of substandard quality.

In response, AR Dairy, which has been producing ghee since 1998 and claims to carry out 102 quality checks on its milk, rejected the allegations as “absurd” and said they are “seriously damaging to our business.”

He said a company quality control manager called claims that fish oil was added “absurd” because fish oil costs more than ghee, and that ” any form of adulteration would be immediately perceptible by its smell.”

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

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

The controversy, however, refused to die down and made headlines across the state. Popular actor and deputy chief minister of the state Pawan Kalyan called the falsification an “attack on Hindu religion”. Kalyan also performs what he calls 11 days of atonement rituals to rectify the “great injustice.”

Members of a Hindu nationalist group demonstrated outside Reddy’s home, chanting slogans. They left after painting the gate and walls saffron – a color worn by many Hindu priests and which is also the color of the flags of the BJP and other Hindu parties.

Authorities in other states have also rushed to test the treats offered at other Hindu temples, including the famous Krishna Temple in Mathura in Uttar Pradesh and the Jagannath Temple in Odisha state.

The question also found an echo on social networks. Laddu, along with hashtags such as #TirupatiLaddu, #TirupatiLadduControversy and #TirupatiLadduRow, have been trending for days on X (formerly Twitter), with many expressing outrage at what they call deliberate attempts to harm the faith Hindu.

Some of the outrage, however, appears to have been fabricated after it was pointed out that many people pledging support for Hindu nationalist groups had shared images of Reddy wearing a Muslim skullcap and ridiculed him as ” anti-Hindu”.

One tweet, shared by many users two days after Naidu’s allegation, was particularly flagged for using identical words by people who appeared unrelated. He said, “For the last 2-3 years, Amma (mother) used to get sick if she tasted Tirupati laddus and told us not to eat too much of it. We put it down to his general paranoia. Now I feel like she sensed something was seriously wrong.