The only similar university in the country is the Dalai Lama’s Gyuto Tantric University in Himachal Pradesh.

“Spiritual and ritualistic practices in our temples have been deteriorating. This is turning people off,” said senior CPM leader and Minister for Temple Affairs G Sudhakaran, maintaining that a Tantric university has been found “necessary” to shore up the state’s waning spiritual inclinations, thanks to “spiritually ignorant” priests.

He said top Hindutva scholars, Vedic exponents, and spiritual gurus will be roped in as faculty. The university will run courses for aspiring priests, besides running continuing education programmes for those already working in temples.

However, the government doesn’t plan to insist that all priests be required to pass the courses — for that would mean fiddling with the touchy area of the traditional and largely hierarchical offices of priests and tantris.

“The idea is to properly educate them on important spiritual areas and ritual practices, and bring them up to the required standards,” says Sudhakaran.

Also, the government doesn’t want the Tantric university yoked to the University Grants Commission. Sudhakaran says it will be run by a trust set up under the Devaswom Board, which manages temple affairs in Kerala and is under government control.

Teachers at the university will also be authorised as spirituality inspectors. “They will inspect temples, make sure spiritual practices are up to standards,” says Sudhakaran, who outlined the idea to the Justice K S Paripoornam Commission, which is probing alleged corruption in the Devaswom Board, when it heard the minister on Thursday morning.

In an earlier hearing, the commission had expressed shock after it heard the Tantri or spiritual head of Kerala’s most high-profile Sabarimala temple, Kantararu Mohanaru, who also heads a panel to select priests, confessed he knew no Sanskrit, had no clue of the Vedas or its mantras and chants.

Incidentally, the late CPM ideologue E M S Namboothiripad had opposed the setting up of the Sri Sankaracharya Sanskrit University in Kalady, saying Sanskrit was a dead language, and such a university would only “aid and abet Hindu communalism.” He had said that Sankaracharya’s Advaita philosophy was outdated and caused India to remain backward.

But after he died in the 1990s, the Left government then in power set up a chair in Namboothiripad’s name in the same university.