The book details how ‘godmen’ have kept taking advantage of the blind faith of devotees to build empires of wealth, exploitation and occasionally crime.
New Delhi: How do “godmen” acquire a massive and fanatic following? What leads them to defend their “criminal ways” despite a conviction, a rarity in India? What keeps attracting followers even after the “godman” has been charged with murder and rape? In God of Sin: The Cult, Clout and Downfall of Asaram Bapu, Ushinor Majumdar, an investigative journalist, attempts to answer such questions by covering the work of law enforcement agencies and their investigators, relying on documents, some in public domain, some not, and, as he says, generally following, wherever possible, “the rule of verification with at least three sources”. While at it, Majumdar has gone deeper and actually built on the detailed cover story (reproduced in the book) on godmen titled “Goddamn” he had written for Outlook magazine in 2017. Majumdar dwells on how, for decades, Asaram Bapu, who rose to become a self-styled godman (a term, the author says, was brought into mainstream media by Chandraswami, allegedly Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s spiritual adviser), presided over an influential empire built on blind faith, and how, along with his son and heir, Narayan Sai, he has now become synonymous with everything that is wrong with self-styled godmen and their cults. The immediate trigger for the Outlook story was the violence and bloodshed perpetrated on the streets of Panchkula by followers of the “baba of bling”, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh “Insaan”, leader of the Dera Sacha Sauda (DSS), who was first convicted by a CBI court and then sentenced to 20 years, along with fines, for the rape of two of his former devotees. This was, as Majumdar had said in the cover story, “possibly the first conviction by Indian courts of a godman for raping his followers”. But the process of downfall of Asaram (real name, Asumal Sirumalani) had been running its course and a long-winded “closure” of some sort had to come, sooner than later. Asaram held significant boroughs of influence across India and there are photos of him with several well-known political leaders throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, till his arrest in a sexual assault case in 2013 and his sentencing to life-long jail term (“till his natural death”) in April 2018. Majumdar goes into great detail to track Asaram’s journey, starting from the banks of the Sabarmati to creating an over Rs 10,000 crore empire with 400 ashrams in India and other parts of the world in four decades. His commercial empire, now being investigated by economic offences agencies, was built on unaccounted donations, loans given at hefty rates of interest, investments in dubious companies, money laundering and dodgy real estate deals. Asaram had been arrested on a complaint of sexual exploitation by a girl from Shahjahanpur of Uttar Pradesh, who had joined Asaram’s ashram at Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh for her studies. Majumdar tracks the twists and turns during Asaram’s trial process, during which he tried his best to obtain bail and moved various courts multiple times, but all his efforts proved futile with the trial courts rejecting his bail pleas. The family of the girl lived in constant terror during the trial. Asaram’s two accomplices, Sharad and Shilpi, were sentenced to 20 years each in jail for raping the minor, while the remaining two co-accused, Shiva and Prakash, were acquitted.
Asaram’s sentencing called for more than a cover story and only a full-fledged book, covering not just Asaram, but other such godmen like Baba Rampal—who was convicted by a court in Hisar on 11 October 2018 along with 28 of his devotees for the murder of six of his followers, based on circumstantial evidence—could have done justice by shedding further light on this expanding universe of wealth, exploitation, sleaze and crime. Five women and a child had been killed in the two-day skirmish between violent devotees and the police which tried to arrest Rampal from his ashram in November 2014. Majumdar says that Asaram’s judicial custody in Jodhpur for sexually assaulting a minor gave two sisters, along with the husband of one of them, the courage to approach the police in Surat in October 2013 against both Asaram and his son Narayan Sai. The elder sister accused Asaram of raping her on several occasions between 1997 and 2006 when she was living at the godman’s headquarters in the Motera ashram. The younger sister accused Narayan Sai of raping her on several occasions between 2002 and 2006, when she had been living at Motera, but the first incident was in the ashram at Jahangirpura, Surat.
Majumdar mentions the role Rakesh Asthana—a senior Indian Police Service (IPS) officer of the Gujarat cadre, who was the then Surat police commissioner and was to later become the CBI special director (now ousted)—played in the investigation. While maintaining that “controversy has dogged this officer (Asthana) as it has every other sleuth who has probed politically charged cases”, Majumdar says: “Asthana’s role in investigating Asaram is crucial on multiple counts. He initiated and supervised the probe into the two sisters’ rape cases in Surat and Ahmedabad against both the godman and his son. The probes eventually led to the digging up of economic offences by the godman’s son and the assassination and murderous assaults on the followers-turned-witnesses. The major haul was of course the forty-two gunny bags of documents that exposed the entire empire that Asaram had built over the decades by misusing the trust his followers placed in him, not to mention the money they gave up to him as their guru, and, in some cases, god.”
The 42 bags of documents—58,000 leaves of various books, ledgers, scraps, loose pages, pinned sheets and digital data on a computer and digital hard drives—were structured first by a chartered accountant who worked for close to 10 weeks with Asthana, whom the author met at the CBI headquarters in New Delhi. Majumdar says: “The economic offences specialist put them together, studied them, undid them and restitched them into a 900-page summary with a cover letter that was reported in the media…”
Majumdar dwells in detail on Narayan Sai, the “son of God”. He says: “As in the case of political dynasties, setting up a quasi-religious dynasty is not easy. The guru must formally introduce his son as his heir and successor. It is not easy to establish the son as the boss in a business, for though the son may command the money, he may not command the respect of his father’s loyal retainers. Narayan Sai’s case was not very different.” Sai did not seem to have any of the charm or persona, nor the talent for oration or skill as his father. Each ashram was self-sufficient, but its functional head was connected with one Kaushik Popatlal Vani, Asaram’s left-hand man for all financial matters, and reported to him for key matters. Majumdar says: “Being the successor to this empire was frustrating for Narayan Sai, who was forty-one years of age at the time of his arrest. Father and son would have conflicts in private over control of their empire, to which only a few were privy.” Sai had to ask Vani for permission to access funds and other resources. Some of Asaram’s closest aides told the police that the father seemed to think that “the son was not yet able to handle the empire”.
Sai had watched how the charges and case against Asaram had unfolded. Sai fled when the police wanted to question him in the first place. With the police on his lookout, Sai travelled incognito through various states after hiding for three weeks in Gujarat, before being finally arrested near Kurukshetra after much drama that is detailed in the book.
Majumdar’s book is a work of good investigation. The sad part is that despite being aware of the possibility of exploitation by such fraudulent self-styled godmen, vulnerable and gullible Indians are likely to continue to fall victims to them over and over again. And more Asaram Bapus, Ram Rahims and Rampals will sprout in future.