Only a fortnight before his murder Swami Gadadharanandji had switched loyalties from the Acharya faction to Dev following a conspiracy to snatch power of the affluent trust. By pulling in Gadadharanand, the Dev group broke the Acharyas' majority in the trust and was poised to take control of it.

Sect head Acharya Ajendraprasadji, the eighth descendant of Lord Swaminarayan and who is among the CBI suspects, admits that the scenario is murky. However, he tries to wash his hands of the controversy, blaming it on ``black sheep'' among the saints and stating that decisions are taken by the trust as a whole.

The first signs of an underlying tension between the Acharya and Dev groups cropped up some 30 years after Lord Swaminarayan set up base in Vadtal in 1878. His fourth-generation descendent, Shreepatiprasad, had sold off a large plot of land on his own accord, apparently against the wishes of the sants and haribhakts. They challenged the move arguing that the Acharya could not sell off property since it belonged to God; they contended later in the Privy Council that the temple, meaning them, had to be consulted. The sants, that is the Dev group, won when the Council upheld their view.

However, this soured relations between the two groups. In 1962, when the fifth-generation descendant Anandprasad sold off land in Sarangpur in Ahmedabad (controlled from Vadtal), the hurt showed. The Dev followers moved the City Civil Court, where they won. The Acharya group contested the decision in the High Court but lost. They appealed to the High Court, where they lost again but not before the court worked out, in 1976, a management formula for the temple. Accordingly, there were to be three Dev group members, three Acharya members and one follower and the Chief Executive Kothari (manager) in a board of trustees.

It was during this case that the allegation cropped up of huge money being involved in the transfer of kotharis to different temples. This is said to be a major issue in the murder of Gadadharanand. This is why the High Court formula devised that the chief executive kothari would have no voting rights in the transfer of Kotharis.

It was about this time that the first murder -- of Manibhai B Patel -- took place in Vadtal. Patel, converted from Akshar Purshottam sect to Vadtal, was done in for he reportedly found fault with operations in Vadtal. In 1986, Natu Swami (Dev group) was killed in his room in the temple complex by a disciple in 1986 over sharing of temple spoils. However, neither of these incidents has had the impact that the abduction of the chief executive has.