The Indian guru jailed for rape
You’d have thought the conviction of an Indian guru for the brutal rape of two female followers would have opened the eyes of his tens of millions of devotees to what a terrible man he really was, said The Hindu (Chennai). Not a bit of it. When news broke that Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, spiritual leader of the Dera Sacha Sauda sect, had been sentenced to 20 years in jail, all hell broke loose. Tens of thousands rioted in India’s northern states, burning cars and buildings and viciously attacking security personnel. At least 38 people died in the mayhem. The bearded 50-year-old guru wailed that he was innocent as the sentence was read out; but lawyers for the victims believe he is guilty of raping many more women at his compound in the north Indian state of Haryana.
To non-devotees, the self-styled “baba of bling” came across as ridiculous, said The Indian Express (Mumbai). Decked out in rhinestones and sequins, encircled by Kalashnikov-wielding guards wherever he went, and given to leaping around in multi-coloured costumes, Singh in his heyday was not just a holy man – he was an entertainment industry. He has released six albums of high-energy pop, the most recent of which, Highway Love Charger, sold three million copies in three days. His movies – in which he credits himself as writer, director, actor and musician – portray him as part motorcycleriding action hero, part divinity. Even when not acting, he calls himself a “messenger of God” and his sprawling sect headquarters is “like a township”, with dorms, factories, even a hospital. And all are run by his followers.
But don’t mock those devotees, said Mani Shankar Aiyar on NDTV.COM (New Delhi). People from “the backward classes” (those deemed by orthodox Hinduism to be outside the caste hierarchy), find in gurus like the “baba of bling” someone who provides them with the “dignity and social support” the rest of Indian society denies them. Low-caste women, in particular, would flock to him to escape the drudgery of their “unending servitude”, and to break “the stranglehold of social structures and cultural strictures governing their everyday lives”. Where we see a narcissist who allegedly, in a weird ritual, would make his female followers “submit to his lust” in return for godlike forgiveness, these women see a genius with “supernatural powers”. No wonder he could prey on them so easily. The other thing to bear in mind, said Srinivasa Prasad on First Post (Mumbai) is that gurus like Singh are hugely powerful politically. In Haryana, where electoral outcomes are often decided by a few thousand votes, he could make or break political careers. Political leaders flocked to him. India’s ruling party, the Hindu nationalist BJP, owes its victory in Haryana to the “messenger of God”.
At least four other Indian gurus have been accused of rape in recent years, said Sharanya Gopinathan, in the same paper. One of them, Asaram Bapu, who was jailed in 2013 for sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl on the pretext of “exorcising evil spirits”, ran more than 400 ashrams in India and abroad. These “godmen”, as they call themselves, “exist at the intersection of religious fervour, political power, public support and, often, massive wealth”. They groom their followers as child-sex predators do, until their victims believe “they are being gloriously singled out for preferential treatment from the leader”. Later, the raped women are afraid to tell anyone, and for good reason: accusers and their supporters have been murdered. The journalist who first exposed Singh was shot dead outside his home in 2002, months after reporting the rape allegations. The predatory guru is behind bars, but how many more are still running their own private harems?