When good karma goes bad

In a popular couple, poet Kabir writes: “Guru Govind dou khade, kaake laagoon paye Balihari guru aapki, Govind diyo milaye.”

I have god and my teacher, both standing in front of me, whose feet should I touch first?

The lord then tells him to touch his guru’s feet first, for he was the one who showed him the path that helped him find god.

A guru has always been powerful in this country; he is the difference between an Arjun and Ekalavya; he can make or break lives. Add to this equation a bit of mysticism and divine intervention, what is born is someone who is not the one to show the path that may lead to god, but a version of god himself.

From Satya Sai Baba to Asaram, from Maharshi Mahesh Yogi to Nityananda, each of these has lived a life surrounded by controversies. Satya Sai Baba had several cases of rape and sexual assault trouble him all his life, yet his popularity graph was ever-rising, with famous people like Sachin Tendulkar becoming his devout disciples.

Maharshi Mahesh Yogi, who was popular for his friendship with the legendry British pop band The Beatles, also made headlines for the wrong reasons when he had a fallout with the band members after alleged sexual advances made towards Hollywood actor Mia Farrow and a few other women.

The notorious Nityananda has had several of such allegations, with a woman having accused him of rape for a continued period of five years. And, who can forget the case of the guardian of morality Asaram being accused of molesting a minor?

The neighbourhood where I grew up had a large number of followers of a sage from Poona. The family members of my childhood friends were devotees of the Baba. I remember going to their weekly gatherings where they would sing songs in praise of their guru, who called himself an Avatar of god. I used to be a regular to these 'meetings', as they were called, only because all my friends would be there and because I enjoyed the limelight as the lead singer of the pack. Not once in those meetings were the preaching of their guru discussed, these were only to sing paeans in his praise; it wasn’t educational, only blindly devotional. At that age, the lack of purpose in those meetings did not bother me, however, I stopped attending them and lost interest in the singing very soon. Also, the foremost disciple of this guru, behaved inappropriately with me. I was very young then, and he was in his seventies. It took me some time to understand that whatever was happening.

In the world of Godmen, in the business of faith, sexual assault is an everyday affair. It is done under the pretext of attaining enlightenment, it is done as a service to your guru, often, it is made to sound like a privilege that it is happening to you, for you are the chosen one, and you shall be bestowed with the wisdom of your guru. It is murky and dark, faith is a mind game, played with the vulnerable, the ones in desperate situations. In a recent article done by Open Magazine called The Sex Lives of Godmen, Mihir Shrivastava cites such horrific examples of violation done in the name of spiritual awakening or spiritual healing. For a man in position of power with several disciples at his disposal, misuse of that power is not too hard to imagine. In this drug-infested, dark world of sadhus, sex is often packaged as a cure, a route to self-awakening. As Shrivastava cites in his article, “Sex is the only way they get a high. Victims do resist the advances of godmen, but they often do not even realise when a red line of violation has been crossed. No consent is either sought or obtained, since rape is packaged as a healing process or some other form of blessing.”

With the changing times, as lifestyles are seeing a paradigm shift, where with the change of one’s socio-economic conditions, stress and insecurities are clouding one's mind, seeking asylum under the thick blanket of spirituality or religion seems like an apt escape from one's predicaments. However, what remains unexplained is the permanence of this faith that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, continues to thrive. In the comment section of the Open, a reader asks for the other side of the story, the story of these sages. What is it that keeps us still hang on to these loose threads of faith? This quest for, what appears to be, a spiritual orgasm is as maddening as the thought of sex-starved sadhus on the loose. And yet, faith, in the minds of those hooked remains unquestioned. If one was to write the other side of the story, it would not be about the sadhus, it would be about the disciples who continue, with mad devotion, in the path of their assumed spiritual awakening.

After all, it was just last month when a local seer from UP called Shobhan Sarkar, the man who dreamt that over 1,000 ton of gold was buried under the ruins of a 19th century king, managed to convince the entire Ministry of Mining and the Archeological Survey of India to start the hunt for the dreamt gold. This incident, the gold that the ASI is looking for, if remained unfound, shall be remembered as a moment of madness, a footnote in the history of popular blunders. However, if the gold is found, it will bury this country into the same hole that the faith brigade has been ceaselessly digging for decades now.