Sleazy sadhus

In Patiala and Delhi, I had a TV in my room and so I checked out what was going on in the 24-hour news cycle world. There were two major scandals in the last couple of weeks involving Indian sadhus, gurus and what-have-you, whom they call by the generic name "babas". At least they seem to have given up the term "God-men" which was a longstanding favorite of theirs I particularly hate. (I seem to be wrong about that.)

There was even a little juicy video to play over and over again, what to speak of other clips of the babas dancing ecstatically. One TV station even played that up by juxtaposing the dancing guru with a belly dancer to make him look even more idiotic. The anchor man very sincerely said, "We are doing this as a public service as so many people put their faith in babas and they need to know who is genuine and who is not."

Then Baba Ramdeva went on record in calling for the death penalty (!) for bogus babas, saying they are giving genuine sadhus a bad name. This was followed by TV footage of some other sadhus in Haridwar saying, "Well, that might be going a little far. Life imprisonment is a better option."

This is part of Ramdeva Baba's nationalistic theme, which a great many of the sannyasis support. He calls his movement Bharata Svabhimana, or "Indian national pride." Here is one of his posters in Hardwar, saying, "Corrupt and treacherous people engage in depraved activities; in the name of doing business foreign companies loot our national wealth and make us poor. We have to stop this looting and make our country great." Now apparently he also wants to get involved in the political process.

The two scandals appear to be somewhat different. The first, Nithyananda, is a handsome young fellow, a lifelong brahmachari, with a lot of charisma. He has a beautiful movie star disciple. It looks like this one was just waiting to happen.

The second, which involves a sleazy character named Bhimananda, looks like it is just waiting for Arvind Adiga to write a novel about it. You can read about him in the first link above. What I find interesting about this fellow is that he made his name as a votary of Shirdi Sai Baba, whose rise and domination of the Hindu religious scene in north India is nothing short of phenomenal. This seems to coincide with the new middle-class prosperity and is no doubt the subject of much academic research.

Though Shirdi Sai Baba is worshiped by Hindus, I believe he more clearly falls into the category of Sufi saints or pirs. There is a whole North Indian tradition of worship at the tombs (dargah) of such Sufi saints, which is syncretic in nature and even dominated by Hindus. The practice has been periodically criticized and condemned by orthodox Islam. It is popular for the same reason saint worship has been in the Christian world: people go seeking intercession in cases of material need. They pray, perform some small ritual (in Bengal, people leave clay figurines on the tombs) and then leave without really challenging their identity as Hindus.

In the conference at JNU, we heard from one good research scholar who talked about the resurgence of such dargahs in Punjab. He showed pictures of several of these newly refurbished places, saying that it was in fact a return to the kind of syncretic Hindu-Muslim culture that existed in the pre-Partition period.

The point I would like to make here is this: The scandals surrounding fallen saints really comes from the ancient association in the minds of many Hindus of celibacy with magical power. The fact is that a great many people approach gurus and sants with the hope of getting material blessings, and it is their requirement that he be siddha. The siddhi is their ability to grant them their wishes. If he can perform miracles, like those of a Satya Sai Baba, then that gives him a free pass. But if not, the minimum requirement is that he (or she) must at least be celibate.

As soon as such a sadhu ceases to be celibate, they feel the contract has been broken. The contract is very simple: "We adore you, give you money and prestige. You get big temples and ashrams. All you have to do, basically, is be celibate. Of course, you do all the religious stuff, too, but everything hinges on you keeping your kaupin tight. In return, we get some satisfaction from doing good and pious deeds and also, hopefully, our material wishes fulfilled." If the sadhu gets involved in sex, then that means this hope is dashed; the desires cannot be fulfilled because it is impossible that he should have any mystic power.

The element of hypocrisy enters the picture, too. But that is secondary. No one will say, "You should have told us, we would have understood." They would not have understood. There would have been no Nithyananda without him wearing saffron.

But I think that Ramdev and the rest are missing the point. The point is, as Prabhupada used to say, that we live in a society of the cheaters and the cheated. A sucker is born every minute, and the basis of suckerhood is wanting and needing something and hoping for miracles to give them an easy route to fulfilment.

That is clear from the Bhimananda case. The man appears to clearly have entered the sadhu game as a money-making scheme and did quite well from the look of it. How he managed to run a prostitution ring with a highly placed clientele at the same time as he played the game of a sadhu is a bit of a mystery. Clearly he is a talented conman. But if he did not have a host of gullible people willing to part with their cash, he would not have gotten anywhere.

Moreover, the problem is as much with the system as with the people. Nithyananda, I would say, is a bit of an innocent victim of the system, but well on the road to cynical exploitation of it--as his response to the video clearly indicates, and as that lazy posture in front of the TV in the video indicates. Bhimananda is a guy who played the system. You can hang all the fake sadhus you want, but there is an endless assembly line turning out such fallen sadhus, vairagis and (aptly named) fakirs. Making threatening gestures like calling for the death penalty is not going to stem the tide.

And this is precisely where the problem lies. Making people's hearts harder is not going to change anything, because everything is hinging on a false premise: no one else can do your brahmacharya for you.

Most of India is still in the grips of a magical concept of religion. And too many of the people in positions of religious leadership cater to that mindset.