From Bikram Choudhury to Gurmeet Ram Rahim, why does India have so many disgraced gurus?
- For the country’s holy men, international notoriety is as common an outcome as global fame
- But their influence is hard to shake at home, where people looking for a purpose or cause too often turn a blind eye to spiritual leaders’ crimes
This is Swami Nithyananda, an Indian spiritual guru, and the video was the unveiling of his own Hindu nation, “Kailaasa” – a nation that does not exist on land, but with boundaries “in the universe, in the cosmos state”. It even has its own website, which describes Kailaasa as the “Greatest Hindu nation” and even promises universal health care, education and food security.
This utopian fantasy might have evoked much mirth, but it concealed a darker side – Nithyananda is a fugitive in India, where he faces charges of rape as well as illegal confinement of children. Days before the video’s release, police in western India’s Gujarat state raided his ashram after the allegations against him surfaced. By then, however, he had already fled India, with local media reports saying he had bought an island near Ecuador to be the site of Kailaasa.
Nithyananda might be the latest Indian spiritual leader to gain international notoriety, but he is not alone. Bikram Choudhury is the subject of the recent Netflix documentary Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator, which details the yoga teacher’s meteoric global rise and the allegations of rape and sexual assault that have followed in the wake of his ascent. The list of gurus who achieve mass popularity before suffering a sharp fall on account of their own misdeeds is long – and is only getting longer.
ASPIRATIONS AND TRADITION