New Delhi, Feb. 20: The Supreme Court will next week hear a case concerning two feuding branches of Iskcon, several of whose monks are nowadays seen chanting “Hare Krishna” in the court’s corridors.

The ochre-clad monks, heads shaved but for a tuft, are caught in a long battle of branch supremacy. The feuding sides are the Mumbai and Bangalore branches of Iskcon, the full name for which is the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.

The Mumbai branch at Juhu was the first society registered under the Iskcon name in 1971. The rival Bangalore branch was established in 1978.

The Bangalore monks have long claimed that the Mumbai branch wanted to control all Iskcon centres and properties in the country. According to the Bangalore society, now worth Rs 39 crore, Iskcon founder Srila Prabhupada had wished that all branches should run as parallel, autonomous units. The Mumbai society was working against the wishes of the deceased founder.

Prabhupada had specifically stated that he did not want a spiritual heir. Instead a group of 12 members, known as the governing body commission (GBC), would loosely oversee Iskcon’s functioning, sources in the Bangalore branch said. In Prabhupada’s lifetime, new branches and temples were opened with the consent of the GBC.

After Prabhupada’s mahasamadhi on November 14, 1977, the GBC, based in the Mumbai centre, took over the responsibility of guiding the Hare Krishna movement.

According to sources in Bangalore Iskcon, a culture clash also played a part in the feud. Bangalore Iskcon felt the Mumbai unit had been taken over by Americans. Bangalore, the sources said, had many more Indian believers.

In 2001, the Bangalore unit moved a civil court seeking to restrain Mumbai from interfering in its temple administration. The case was decreed in favour of Bangalore Iskcon in April 2009 and it got the right to operate the temple independent of Mumbai Iskcon.

But Karnataka High Court reversed the order on May 23, 2011. The Bangalore branch then went to the Supreme Court. In an interim order passed on July 5, 2011, the top court allowed Bangalore Iskcon to operate its temple but restrained its office bearers from taking any policy decisions.

The apex court also said that till it decided the matter, a committee headed by a former Supreme Court judge would be in charge of the Bangalore Iskcon temple administration.