22/05/2026
Statement / Clarification
The undersigned Official Working Groups and Services of Auroville issue the following response to the public statement dated 18 May 2026 by former members of the International Advisory Council concerning the current situation in Auroville.
The full text is reproduced below.
The attached images show the official PDF version.
-----
Dear Former Members of the International Advisory Council,
and in particular Mr. Doudou Diène, whom many of us remember warmly,
We, the undersigned members of various statutory working groups and services of Auroville, write in response to your public statement dated 18 May 2026 regarding the current situation in Auroville.
We do so with deep disappointment, not because concerns were raised — concerns can and should always be discussed sincerely — but because your statement reproduces, almost verbatim, a narrative that has for years been systematically circulated by a small but highly organized faction opposed to the present functioning of the Auroville Foundation and the implementation of the approved Master Plan. The statement presents allegations as established truths, omits material facts, ignores the long history of obstruction and aggression faced by the working groups, and ultimately lends the moral authority of former IAC members to a sustained campaign of misinformation, institutional destabilization, and defamation directed against Auroville itself.
For over five years, the functioning statutory bodies of Auroville have faced relentless obstruction: blockades of approved development works, organized intimidation campaigns, coordinated media defamation, harassment of officials, anonymous propaganda networks, parallel unauthorized bodies falsely claiming legitimacy, politically motivated litigation, repeated attempts to internationalize internal disputes through misleading representations, and increasingly aggressive physical confrontations. Yet your statement makes no acknowledgement whatsoever of this sustained context.
Instead, those attempting to uphold the Auroville Foundation Act, implement the Master Plan approved by the Mother, and restore administrative functionality are portrayed as aggressors, while those who have repeatedly obstructed, threatened, defamed, occupied, and disrupted institutional functioning are implicitly legitimized.
This inversion of reality is deeply troubling.
With regard to the incidents specifically cited in your statement:
1. Afsanah Guest House (October 2025)
The transition at Afsanah did not arise arbitrarily. The interim executives, who on record have mismanaged the funds of the guest house, were repeatedly requested over several months by the competent authorities to hand over management and records to the newly constituted team. Those communications were met not with cooperation, but with abusive responses and categorical refusal to comply with administrative decisions. Only after prolonged non-compliance, repeated warnings, and complete institutional deadlock were the premises entered in the presence of Security personnel. Despite sensational allegations subsequently circulated internationally, there exists clear video documentation showing that no violent assault or “brutal takeover” occurred. Yet fabricated narratives of “martial arts attacks” and “violent seizure” were immediately amplified through activist networks and sympathetic media channels. What was brutal and violent was the resistance to methodical and lawful action.
2. Youth Centre Clearing (20 March 2026)
Your statement describes the dismantling of the Youth Centre as “brutal” and “unprovoked.” This characterization is both inaccurate and profoundly one-sided.
The issue of the Youth Centre cannot be divorced from the decades-long obstruction of the Crown Road and associated HT cable corridor — a critical element of the approved Galaxy Plan, envisioned by the Mother herself and recognized since 1970 as a priority development after the Matrimandir. For over twenty years, a small group repeatedly blocked implementation while claiming moral authority in the name of “community.” The so-called Youth Centre site became, in practice, a political blockade point.
Numerous concerns had been raised over a prolonged period regarding unauthorized activities, including repeated late-night parties, substance abuse complaints, unauthorized monetization, unrestricted outsider access, security complaints from residents and parents, including allegations of prostitution and complaints of r**e, not to mention complete refusal to comply with minimum administrative norms. Importantly, this was never the officially designated site for a Youth Centre, the original approval having been temporary and next to the current occupation area, and alternative locations had been offered multiple times. Notably not one of the buildings in the Youth Center took permission and NOC from the statutory ATDC, not even retrospectively.
The reality is that the structure had become a symbol of organized resistance to the implementation of the Master Plan, defiance to the processes and procedures for permission applicable to all as per the statutory Master Plan, rather than a genuinely inclusive educational or youth institution serving the broader community.
What is especially shocking is the selective outrage expressed in your statement. On the same day, multiple working group members and Aurovilians were physically attacked, threatened, and assaulted. There are recorded instances of point-blank death threats, violent conduct, assault of Sindhuja, a woman, by Dingbawi, and direct physical attack against Joel, who sustained blood injuries. Even worse, fabricated and counterblast complaints against the victims were filed in an attempt to neutralize or nullify the effect of the complaint lodged against the actual trespassers and attackers.
Yet your statement condemns only the administration and remains entirely silent about the violence perpetrated against those carrying out authorized work on behalf of the Foundation.
Such selective moral concern is difficult to reconcile with fairness or impartiality.
3. Town Hall / Common Meeting Room Incident (13 May 2026)
The Town Hall is an institutional workspace intended for the functioning of officially constituted working groups and services. Over time, however, certain dissolved, unrecognized or unauthorized parallel groups continued occupying common spaces and using them as operational centers for political mobilization, adverse litigation planning, media propaganda coordination, and obstruction campaigns against statutory bodies. These actions cannot and will not be authorized.
The 13 May incident arose from a scheduling conflict concerning a room already booked for official use. Yet what followed was immediately reframed publicly as another example of “authoritarian aggression.”
Particularly concerning is the attempt to portray certain individuals as innocent victims while omitting their own repeated misconduct. One such individual, Mr. Arun Ambathy, who has been declared persona non grata by Competent Authority following repeated and documented engagement in provocative and abusive conduct towards working group members, interference with authorized development works, continuous distasteful slander of Auroville, its officers and members of groups on media and social media, and participation in organized obstruction of Master Plan implementation. During the incident in question, he physically assaulted working group members, captured neatly on camera, including the dragging of a woman’s phone and her hair, using criminal force when she resisted, snatching the mobile phones of others. Yet again, your statement ignores these facts entirely while focusing exclusively on the temporary confiscation of a phone by Antim, who did so after due warning during an escalating confrontation. Whether Antim, in his role as an office bearer, who had the authority to be in that meeting room while Ambathy himself was trespassing by law, creating nuisance to others including women who protested being recorded, was right in his confiscation of the phone which was promptly handed over to the police 15 minutes later, is a matter of judicial scrutiny and shall be settled at the correct forums. But Ambathy’s assault on Sindhuja needs no expert to tell us whether it was right or wrong - it is plain for all to see and it is beyond disgraceful that such esteemed people as yourselves have refused to even acknowledge this fact.
This deliberate omission creates a fundamentally distorted picture and informs us clearly of where your loyalties currently lie.
4. Land Exchanges
Your remarks on land exchanges are particularly disappointing because several among you are fully aware of the immense efforts previously undertaken under the leadership of Dr. Karan Singh to enable consolidation of Master Plan lands through exchanges. Those efforts were repeatedly obstructed by precisely the same organized faction that now presents itself internationally as the authentic voice of the Residents’ Assembly.
Many will remember Dr. Karan Singh’s own deeply anguished communication to the community after those earlier efforts were sabotaged. He appealed to Aurovilians not to sacrifice the future of the city to narrow interests and personal attachment. Those appeals went unheeded.
The present land exchanges did not emerge casually or secretly. They underwent extensive scrutiny and required approvals at multiple levels of Government, including examination by several Ministries. Many of the allegations subsequently made against these exchanges have already been tested before courts and have failed to withstand scrutiny. Yet despite this, the same narratives continue to be repeated internationally as unquestioned truth.
What is even more concerning is the fact that you have conveniently ignored the fact that these issues have been agitated before courts of law - not once but thrice - and has been dismissed entirely and well settled up to the Supreme Court that the Governing Board is entirely in the right, due consultation was indeed completed, and that the allegations of loss to Auroville had no basis nor validity. When something is litigated and settled, it is not up to any of us to speculate and restate it as an open question - even doing so is contemptuous and dishonouring the laws of India. We would have expected better of you, learned people, to exercise more caution and be more informed.
To portray land exchange as inherently illegitimate while ignoring the court verdicts and statutory mandate to consolidate Master Plan lands is intellectually dishonest and deeply unfair to those trying to realize the city physically after decades of paralysis.
5. Visas
Your statement on visas repeats allegations without acknowledging either the sovereign authority of the Government of India in immigration matters or the actual conduct records involved in several cases.
The reality is that between July 2021 and September 2025, approximately 2,601 visa and extension applications were processed, with an overwhelming majority recommended positively. Only a very small percentage involved restrictions or adverse recommendations, often connected to serious and repeated issues involving non-cooperation, institutional misconduct, illegal activities, or actions directly undermining the functioning and stability of Auroville.
To casually imply that all visa issues arise merely from “dissent” is irresponsible and misleading. Such statements erase the distinction between legitimate disagreement and organized campaigns of obstruction, intimidation, misinformation, and destabilization.
Finally, we must express our sadness that former members of the IAC — individuals who once carried the responsibility of guiding Auroville towards unity and higher consciousness — have chosen to publicly reinforce one-sided narratives without first engaging seriously with those currently carrying the burden of administration, planning, legal defense, development implementation, and institutional restoration.
The present administration and working groups did not create the divisions in Auroville. The divisions existed long before this administration came in, the battle lines were drawn years ago, and the foothold of these entrenched opposing forces is not a new phenomenon. The new administration inherited years of paralysis, entrenched obstruction, financial opacity, administrative dysfunction, and growing hostility towards any attempt to implement the Master Plan or uphold statutory governance. The outburst of visible conflict was absolutely unavoidable and the perpetrators of these outbursts are not those working with the administration today but those who have resisted since time immemorial the manifestation of Her project, the city the Earth Needs, attempting to swap it for their own personal preferences and ideas. Manifesting this City in all its aspects - from the most material Yantric form given by Her to what animates it - would have an enormous impact on the trajectory and unfolding of the evolution of the entire earth.
Despite relentless attacks, defamation, legal harassment, social boycotts, and physical intimidation, the working groups continue to serve with dedication towards the realization of the Mother’s vision: the implementation of the Galaxy Plan, the restoration of institutional functioning, the consolidation of Master Plan lands, the development of infrastructure, and the protection of Auroville’s future as an actual city — not merely an abstract ideal invoked selectively to resist all change. We are not easily deterred, even in spite of your extremely disproportionate and weak stance, siding with the true aggressors.
We therefore urge you, respectfully but firmly, to reconsider the manner in which your moral authority is being used by a narrow faction engaged in sustained campaigns against the Auroville Foundation and its functioning institutions. Such a reconsideration would benefit you - The Mother does not need anyone to agree with the Truth for it to become so.
True service to Auroville today requires helping restore collaboration, discipline, truthfulness, and collective responsibility — not legitimizing narratives rooted in division, obstruction, and propaganda.
We remain committed to the Mother’s work, to Sri Aurobindo’s vision, and to the realization of Auroville through sincerity, unity, discipline, and collective effort. And we will continue to fight this battle, relentlessly, for we are on the ground, watching every second of the Lila, and have no confusion about the difference between what is Truth and what is Falsehood.
If you are truly interested to know more about any of the incidents, you may contact us, we will be available to clarify.
May Her Will be Done. Satyameva Jayate.
In the words of The Mother:
“...Lying down in front of a train to prevent it from passing is a moral violence which can create more disturbances than physical violence [..] That is a good example: you should make them understand that lying down in front of a train to prevent it from passing is as great a violence… even greater than attacking it with weapons…”
“When you have nothing pleasant to say about something or somebody in the Ashram, keep silent.”
“You must know that this silence is faithfulness to the Divine’s work.” 22 October 1965, CWM - Words of the Mother, Relations with Persons Outside the Ashram, p. 145
Best Regards,
The Working Committee of The Resident’s Assembly
Ms. Anu Legrand
Mr. Arun Selvam
Mr. Joseba Martinez
Mr. Selvaraj Damotharan
Mr. Parthasarathy Krishnan
Auroville Town Development Council
Ms. Jaya Berggreen-Clausen
Ms. Shindhuja Jagadeesh
Mr. Toby Neuman
Mr. Jothi Prasad Rajan
Mr. Ponnusamy Murugesan
Funds and Assets Management Committee
Mr. Chandresh
Mr. Kalia
Admissions & Terminations Scrutinizing Committee
Mr. Antim Singhi
Ms. Muriel Ghion
Admission & Termination Registry
Mr. Joel Van Lierde
Mr. William Anthony Raj
Auroville Security & Emergency Service
Mr. Giacomo
