India's Baba Phenomenon: Rising Vulnerability and Insecurity in the past 30 years

 

Scammers, Godmen, Political Parties use similar techniques to manipulate minds

 

Will India get over its obsession with godmen?

K N Pannikar in The Hindu

The recent revelations about the ‘divine preoccupations’ of godmen in the sacred precincts of their ashrams have been appalling, not because they were bereft of such qualities in the past. From the time of the Maharaj libel case (1862) through the intrigues of Chandraswami and Dhirendra Brahmachari, to the contemporary saga of Dera Sacha Sauda and Asaram Bapu, the list is unending. But this time the incidents of sex, murder and mayhem, which were reportedly enacted in their ashrams, are lurid and startling. That the godmen were able to pursue their interests for years without attracting the attention of the state is perhaps not surprising, given the nexus between political power and religious establishments, but it is reprehensible.

The unflinching faith of the followers in the divinity of godmen is the latter’s main capital, which is assiduously constructed over time. Under coercion or consent, the devotees appear to submit to the extortion or exploitation of godmen. Contemporary India looks like a modern country with scientific establishments, and high-speed trains and expansive highways, but set in a social situation reeking of medievalism, caste discrimination, religious obscurantism, gender inequality and superstitions.


Modernity and irrationality

The coexistence of modernity with irrationality and obscurantism, which has often been dismissed as a passing phase of a society in transition, has been a (the?) hallmark of independent India. The ruling elite pinned their hopes on economic development to overcome this impediment, but economic development has not been all-embracing. Facing the crisis thus generated by the apparently elite character of development, it was not surprising that a large segment of the population succumbed to the temptations of an unreal world which godmen proffered.

Yet another constituency of the godmen were the members of the burgeoning middle class of the post-Independence era. The hallmark of this class was the intense cultural and social crisis for which they sought a solution in other-worldliness advocated by the godmen. They were led to an island of liberation where all social inhibitions could be shed, and peace and salvation promised, through the medium of the godmen. The mindless support godmen thus elicit from their unsuspecting followers is used to garner social, political and economic power.

In recent times, the increasing number of godmen (and women) are spotted in State governments and corporate board meetings, educational institutions, and all other important places. They are not spiritual men but ambitious con artists who purvey deception, falsehood and religiosity in the name of god.


Education not enough

Rationalists and liberals looked upon education which promoted scientific temper and rational thinking as the antidote to what they conceived as a result of cultural and social backwardness. But education has not adequately fulfilled this role. After all, the substantial following that godmen command is not from the illiterate masses, but from the well-educated middle class that tends to celebrate the irrational in the name of culture.

Popular media, either consciously or unconsciously, promotes and reinforces irrationality and superstition. The reading material available in almost all Indian languages is replete with accounts of the charismatic personae and spiritual qualities of godmen. Not only religious channels, but some secular channels too telecast programmes eulogising their qualities and achievements. From these popular representations, and patronage they seem to enjoy from the state, they derive considerable legitimacy.


The godmen are here to stay, until social consciousness undergoes a qualitative change.

Holy men — theirs and ours

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn

INDIA and Pakistan have more influential holy men per square mile than anyone has ever counted. Some are just rich, others both powerful and rich. Once upon a time their followers were only the poor, superstitious and illiterate. But after the massive resurgence of religion in both countries this base has expanded to include politicians, film and cricket stars, and college-educated people who speak English and drive posh cars.

It is rare for an Indian holy man to bite the dust but one just did. The self-styled messenger of God, Ram Rahim Singh of Dera Sacha Sauda was convicted of two rapes by an Indian court. He is also accused of 52 other rapes, two murders, and storing 400 pairs of testicles in his refrigerators cut from 400 devotees on the promise of getting them nirvana. An avid Modi supporter, Singh travelled in entourages of 100-plus cars and claims 50-60 million followers. Vote-hungry politicians have touched his feet and done deals. After his conviction his crazed followers rioted, convinced of a conspiracy against their God. So far 38 people have died, hundreds injured, cars and public buildings set on fire.

But although Singh is one of India’s bigger holy men he is still small, dispensable fry. The really powerful ones are those who have learned the value of using religion in national politics. Today India is living out the extremist Hindutva ideology of Golwalkar and Savarkar with a head of government who is unabashedly committed to Hindu supremacy. This holy man’s clear and evident role in the communal riots of Gujarat in 2002 had led to his being banned from entering the US in 2005. However, no Indian court could find any wrongdoing committed by the then chief minister, now prime minister.

Pakistan’s holy men also come in two sorts. The pir resembles the Hindu and Sikh spiritual guru in some respects. He hands out amulets, prescriptions, and blessings — usually for a hefty price — to credulous mureeds (followers). Pirs allegedly have magical healing powers. For example, Benazir Bhutto was a mureed of the prescient Pir Pinjar, a man who claimed to cure terminally ill patients by spraying water on them with a garden hose. Her husband, ex-president Asif Ali Zardari, had a black goat sacrificed daily on the advice of his pir. But educated Muslims increasingly spurn such practices and the pir is losing out.

The second kind of Pakistani holy man — the mullah — has had a very different trajectory. Once a poor and largely harmless cleric, he was the butt of many a joke. Sought only for funerals and Friday prayers, he eked out an existence by teaching the Quran to children. Allama Iqbal heaped scorn upon him: Teri namaz main baqi jalal hai na jamal (The prayers you lead are empty of grace and grandeur), Teri azaan main nahin meri sehr ka payam (Your azan is cold and uninspiring).

But the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 changed the mullah’s fortunes. Indispensable to the US-Pakistan-Saudi grand jihad alliance, this once pathetic figure could now be seen driven around in a SUV, commanding a militia, or screaming through multiple turbo-charged loudspeakers. Some eventually became successful land-grabbers, wheeler-dealers, and shady entrepreneurs. Few Pakistanis will fail to recognise the identities of Maulana Diesel, Maulana Whiskey, and Mullah Disco.

Serious conflict between mullah and state came after 9/11. Gen Musharraf’s apparent surrender to America enraged the mullah, who resolved to seize control of the Pakistani state. Ensconced in the heart of Pakistan’s capital, armed vigilante groups from Islamabad’s Red Mosque and Jamia Hafsa took over a government building, in January 2007. They kidnapped ordinary citizens and policemen, and repeated the demands of tribal militants fighting the Pakistan Army. From their FM station they broadcast a message: “We have weapons, grenades and we are expert in manufacturing bombs. We are not afraid of death.” Islamabad turned into a war zone and, by the time the insurrection was finally crushed, 150-200 lives had been lost.

Pakistani courts have failed to convict our holy men (as well as women). For example, Maulana Aziz and Umme Hassan (his wife, who headed Jamia Hafsa) were exonerated of any wrongdoing and are today going about their normal business. The court had ruled that possession of heavy weaponry by the accused could not be proven. It dismissed TV footage that showed Aziz’s students with gas masks firing Kalashnikovs. Weapons seized by the army and placed in a police armoury disappeared mysteriously. Although 10 of Pakistan’s crack SSG commandos died in the crackdown, the army — known for quick action in Balochistan — also did not pursue the case.

Why have Indians and Pakistanis become so tolerant — nay, supportive — of holy men, whether of the spiritual or political kind? Why are those who aspire to power so successful in using religion to motivate their electorates? After all, this is the 21st century, not the 12th.

The culprit could be modernity. Technology has created enormous psychological distress by doing away with traditional ways of living and bringing in a new, uncertain and ever-changing world. Older forms of associations such as the extended family and village community, together with their values, are disappearing. Cramped living conditions, pollution, ugliness all around, and job insecurities are a fact of life for most urban dwellers.

There is enormous nostalgia for the time when the world was supposedly perfect. This is why people looking for simple answers to today’s complex questions eagerly buy the wares peddled by holy men. Just as Hindutva encourages Indian Hindus to dream of the ‘authentic’ India, Muslim clerics tell their followers to dream of reclaiming Islam’s ancient glories.

But this is clutching at a straw. It gets far worse when religion is infused into politics. This produces a highly toxic, explosive mix as large masses of people blindly and unquestioningly follow holy men. Instead of dividing people still further, whether inside or outside national boundaries, South Asian states should aspire towards becoming a part of cosmopolitan world society removed from the prejudices of religion, caste and race.

'I am drowning and you are describing the water' - A critique of India's liberals

Javed Naqvi in The Dawn

“THEY have the president. They have the vice president. They have both houses of Congress. They have the supreme court too. But, wait a minute, we have the majority.” That was Michael Moore speaking to his audience recently in his one-man show at Broadway about the political equation in Trump’s America.

Moore’s reference was to an encouraging fact that Donald Trump won the election but lost the popular vote. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The equation applies to Modi’s India too, even if the opposition, rather mysteriously, I feel, doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge it. What did Mr Modi’s fabled popularity in 2014 amount to? He got 52 per cent seats with 31pc votes! Will the Indian opposition heed Moore?

There are understated problems, of course. In America, the opposition comes from the people, militantly united if required or peacefully persevering where it works. The agitators in India are scattered into caste, regional and linguistic pursuits if they are not in the meantime falling at the feet of some fraudulent spiritual guru. As some say, it is a big failure for India’s left that the masses who should be better educated in the 70 years of independence are turning to spurious god men for false hope.

Another pervasive problem is that people almost religiously believe that a court of law can address all the challenges to democracy. “Court-aat bhetu ya,” is a familiar Maharashtrian challenge to an adversary. See you in the court. People are not listening to what Michael Moore knows otherwise.


Fascists are usually better equipped to advance their planned and coordinated objectives by wrecking the legal compact, by hollowing out democracy’s beams and pillars.

Kondratiev waves of high and low emotions have thus stalked too many of my friends over the years, nearly always to do with Indian courts and their rulings and the government’s response or absence of it. The legal defeat of the nefarious privacy bill brought joy beyond belief. Edward Snowden would be smiling. As he would see it, the state already knows far more about its subjects than it perhaps wants to know.

Moreover, how long would it take for an intrusive government to overturn any court ruling, say, by presidential decree? If it won’t do that, it doesn’t need to do that. The creeping fascist challenge comes from overwhelming street power where courts have little say and virtually no control.

Fascists can use instruments of law, of course, to torment their opponents — as they did with the legendary artist M.F. Husain. Recently they commandeered the law against student leaders of rare spunk, while putting a 90pc crippled professor in jail, convincing the courts that the wheelchair-bound man’s freedom was a threat to Indian security.

Fascists are usually better equipped to advance their planned and coordinated objectives by wrecking the legal compact, by hollowing out democracy’s beams and pillars. If they have their way with the constitution they will rewrite it. If not, they will subvert it anyway.

One doesn’t have to look too hard to divine the pattern. People gaping with disbelief at the government’s apparent connivance with a convicted rapist the other day forgot that the Babri Masjid was destroyed only after snubbing the supreme court. Remember how senior politicians thumbed their noses at the court’s restraining orders against changing the status quo in Ayodhya.

Nobody was punished for the outrage. In fact, stalwarts among the accused became powerful ministers. Recently, the supreme court ordered the expediting of cases against men and women involved in the destruction of the mediaeval mosque. The court has set a two-year deadline for a non-stop trial followed by an early verdict. That would roughly coincide with the 2019 general elections.

In the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose equation between Indian fascists and the opposition, the fascists will be inevitably heading the victory celebrations. They will either claim vindication of their false innocence or they would play the martyr. As the dice seems loaded, the opposition, including our liberal friends, doesn’t have a trick to give it succour. Their joy could come by turning a collective if scattered majority into a winning showdown with Prime Minister Modi in two years. The judicial route to retrieve democracy can at best be a palliative, not a cure. Even the judges know that.

Ideologues of fascism are running the government and they are running the parallel government through the lynch mobs. The violent ban imposed by right-wing groups with the connivance of the state on interfaith marriages they nefariously call love jihad, and their intrusion into people’s eating habits and so forth, became possible only by tossing the law books out of the window.

A recent decoy that sent the liberals brimming with joy was the supreme court’s ban on triple talaq, reference to instant divorce by Muslim husbands. Look again, triple talaq was banned in Pakistan in 1961. So why did Tehmina Durrani published My Feudal Lord in 1991? Read it. Among other searing challenges, in which triple talaq comes low down the order, married women in a feudal society struggle to even secure a divorce from a man they didn’t want to live with.

Ms Durrani’s marriage to an eminent political figure turned into a nightmare. Violently possessive and pathologically jealous, the husband cut her off from the outside world. When she decided to rebel, as a Muslim woman seeking a divorce, she signed away all financial support, lost the custody of her four children, and found herself alienated from her friends and disowned by her parents.

We are not even beginning to discuss bride burning and honour killings that stalk women in South Asia with impunity. Banning instant divorce was important, not the celebrations it triggered. “I am drowning, and you are describing the water,” complained Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets. He may have been critiquing the liberal Indians.

Asaram Bapu's moment of reckoning

Dileep Padgaonkar in the Times of India

Every murky controversy that involves a self-appointed dispenser of cures for all physical, psychic and societal ailments sheds a harsh light on two on developments that have surfaced across the world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the rise of blind faith at a personal level and of politics rooted in religious radicalism. Both seek to provide an anchor to individuals and communities trapped in a maelstrom of unprecedented change spear-headed by technological innovations and the globalised economy.

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These are perceived as threats to cultures and ways of life, to deeply-entrenched religious beliefs and to moral certitudes. And the riposte of ordinary folk to such threats is to repose their trust in those who claim to have a privileged access to God. Indeed, even when such individuals are caught with, so to speak, their pants down, the faithful are willing to overlook their trespasses. The yawning gap between what they preach – austerity, abstinence, altruism – and what they practice – an opulent life-style, sexual promiscuity and a no-holds-barred acquisitiveness – is of little concern to them.

The case of Asumal Harpalani aka Asaram Bapu is significant in this regard. Ever since he was accused of molesting a minor girl, the media have unveiled his trajectory from his birth in a family of modest means in the Sindh province of British India to one of the country’s most prosperous and influential ‘spiritual’ gurus. It tells a fascinating story of the transformation of a bootlegger – whose family arrived in Ahmedabad after Partition -into a figure who has built an empire that is conservatively estimated to be worth more than Rs. 10,000 crores and who, according to his official website, has twenty million followers in India and abroad. 

These followers have apparently not turned hostile to Asaram despite the contrasts between what he preaches and what he practices. He owns a posse of expensive cars, travels business class, ensures that he isn’t frisked by security at airports and continues to expand his real estate empire. Neither the cases of land-grabbing nor the cases of four youths who ‘disappeared’ in his institutions – the mutilated bodies of two of them were later found on the banks of the Sabarmati – have diminished his appeal.

That explains why most politicians take care not to rub him the wrong way. To take him to task is to alienate a sizeable section of the Hindu vote. Or so they reckon.  Congress leaders have yet to pull him up for his alleged sexual assault on a minor girl. But it is the BJP that takes the cake. Leaders like Uma Bharati and Pravin Togadia have rushed to his defence. In videos that have gone viral on Youtube other worthies of the Sangh Parivar have hailed him as a genuine saint. And the ‘saint’ himself has called the latest allegations a political conspiracy to frame him while son and presumptive heir has dubbed the minor girl as ‘mentally deranged.’

Armed with this support, Asaram has been able to defy law enforcers with impunity. On the grounds that he was engaged in meditation, he kept police waiting for several hours before he deigned to receive a summons to appear for questioning. He then grandly declared that he would not appear before the concerned authorities right away since he has a busy schedule until September 18. And he has continued to visit his scores of ashrams and educational institutions, address the faithful, heap scorn of the media and denounce his critics in a language that suits not a spiritual leader but, well, a clandestine seller of adulterated spirits. Such are the methods of the proponents of a Hindu Rashtra – the very ones that are dear to the proponents of a strident, Islamic rule in Muslim-majority countries or to literalist Christian evangelists in many parts of the world.

The only hope in this sordid saga is that the girl who has accused Asaram of molesting her will stick, along with her parents, to her courageous stand to expose him for what he is: a charlatan who tarnishes the uplifting traditions of Hinduism with his questionable conduct. Should the police do their job and arrest him without delay and haul him up before the courts, the victim would be vindicated.

The parties that swear by the rule of law will then fall in line while those who place their religious faith above the law and the Constitution will be shamed to follow suit. By and by, his blind devotees, too, would realise that the ‘saint’ they venerate is a man of straw. Keep your fingers crossed.