Ascetic Games

by Dhirendra K Jha

  Dharam Das claimed that Varma’s marathon argument in court delayed the proceedings further and that this was part of Gyan Das’s larger strategy to deny him his due. The case continued to be heard through the three important bathing dates and was concluded only after Dharam Das lost the opportunity to possibly lead the last shahi snan in the Ardh Kumbh.

  ‘Shivnanadan Das’s defence was that though his term was to end only at the time of the first shahi snan of 2007, Dharam Das had staked his claim for the post on the basis of a resolution passed in 2004 [by the Ujjainia patti nominating Dharam Das as the next shri mahant]. Therefore, we pleaded that this resolution on which Dharam Das had based his case be declared erroneous,’ said Varma. ‘The court’s ruling came on 12 November 2007. It rejected the claim of Dharam Das to be Shivnandan Das’s successor.’

  But even before the court’s decision, Gyan Das took another step to block Dharam Das from becoming the shri mahant. Soon after the Ardh Kumbh, he got Shivnandan Das to resign from the post and declared his loyalist Avadhesh Das as the new shri mahant. Since Avadhesh Das belonged to the same tok as Dharam Das—the tok whose chance it was to nominate the shri mahant—the latter could not go to court again.

  Dharam Das, however, was not ready to give up his claim. He knew that he could not file a legal suit against this appointment, but he had other ways to force his way to the top of the akhara. He intensified his efforts to trap Gyan Das through legal means. On the one hand he continued to pursue the roza-iftaar case, and on the other, he tried relentlessly to get Gyan Das included in the charge sheet for the clash of 25 November. Finally, under the direction of the Allahabad High Court, Gyan Das was included in the charge sheet.

  The more Dharam Das pursued the cases, the more Gyan Das came under pressure. His advocate Varma told me later, that in the event of a defeat in either of the cases, Gyan Das would have to resign as president of the AIAP, which would hugely diminish his power. It would also mean that the security cover provided to him by the government would be withdrawn. Similarly, a defeat in the iftaar case would mean that he would no longer remain a resident member of Hanumangarhi, which would also strip him of his power.

  ‘At one point of time, things became really difficult for Gyan Das,’ said Varma. ‘Dharam Das’s supporters used to shout in court that they were ready to go to jail but that Gyan Das should also be arrested. They knew that if Gyan Das remained in jail for even forty-eight hours, he would lose his post of president of the All India Akhara Parishad.’

  It was against this backdrop around the beginning of 2009 that Gyan Das looked to settle things with Dharam Das. ‘A civil judge of Faizabad took the initiative and called the two for a compromise,’ said Varma. ‘Gyan Das agreed not to hold roza-iftaar gatherings in the future. Dharam Das agreed to withdraw both his cases, but only if he was made the shri mahant of Nirvani ani.’

  Gyan Das had no option but to appoint Dharam Das as the shri mahant. Only by accepting defeat could Gyan Das buy time for himself. Therefore, on 15 July 2009, he agreed to the terms, and the civil judge of Faizabad gave his ruling, upholding the compromise between the two warring naga leaders.

  To implement the compromise, Gyan Das first tried to persuade Avadhesh Das, the naga he had made shri mahant only two years ago, to resign from the post. But Avadhesh Das wouldn’t agree. Gyan Das, therefore, organised a meeting in Hanumangarhi and invited both Avadhesh Das and Dharam Das. ‘Avadhesh Das didn’t turn up and as such he was removed from the post of shri mahant. Dharam Das was declared the new shri mahant,’ said Varma.

  Avadhesh Das challenged this decision in court, and Varma now became his counsel. ‘He is still fighting, but his case has started becoming weak because he doesn’t want to spend money,’ Varma explained.

  Nevertheless, Dharam Das got what he wanted. Once the preparation for the 2010 Haridwar Kumbh began, it was he who represented Nirvani ani in the meetings of officials and heads of other akharas for the allotment of land in the mela area. And once the shahi snan began, it was he who led, sitting on his favourite white horse, the shahi julus of all the akharas attached to the Nirvani ani. He will continue to do so until the beginning of the next Kumbh in Haridwar in 2021, which would mark the end of his twelve-year term, perhaps even longer.

  His stock rose further after the BJP won a landslide victory in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections in 2017, and Yogi Adityanath, the mahant of Gorakshapeeth temple in Gorakhpur, who continues to share a good rapport with Dharam Das at the time of the publication of this book, became the chief minister of the state. The change of guard in the state weakened Gyan Das, and further fuelled Dharam Das’s ambitions. Although Gyan Das has already started working on his plans to make his own protégé the next shri mahant of Nirvani ani, Dharam Das does not intend to vacate the post in the near future. After all, not all his predecessors followed the twelve-year norm. ‘Twelve years? What twelve years? Do you know for how many years Santsevak Das was the shri mahant? I’ll give you the answer: he remained in this post for more than twenty-four years,’ Dharam Das said, when asked if he would vacate his post voluntarily after twelve years.

  Not only did he seem determined but also appeared certain that the decision to resign from the post would be his alone. ‘Only when a fool rules, do his opponents disappear. But now money can buy you anything. Don’t worry; nobody will disappear,’ he said, referring to the high-handed manner in which issues used to be settled in Hanumangarhi when Gyan Das reigned supreme.

  Hanumangarhi’s history tells a different story. Gyan Das, the naga whom Dharam Das eventually defeated, must have also been as certain, just as all the other despots who spread terror. Dharam Das, who overthrew a giant to make his way to the top of the Nirvani ani, will now have to be on his guard. After all, discontent and ambition created him, and may, if allowed to grow, wipe him out, too.

  By March 2019, Dharam Das had embarked on the latest chapter of his career—he was fighting a case, along with BJP leaders L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharati and over a dozen others, for the conspiracy to demolish Babri masjid.

  3

  KUMBH MELA AS POLITICAL THEATRE

  There now exists a class of sadhus who are not quite like the rest of the fraternity. In the past, they were swayamsevaks, or volunteer-activists in the RSS, or even pracharaks, who are full-time members of the organisation, and the Sangh’s endorsement continues to play an important role in their lives—and success—even after they become sadhus. The difference between this class of sadhus and the rest may not be visible to outsiders, but in the insular world of Hindu monastic orders, the strain of their presence is undeniable. Though these men claim that they don’t function as a distinct group among the sadhus, they are, because of their past, known to work in tandem with the political outfit, pursuing the RSS’s mandate furiously and stubbornly, sometimes co-opting the rest of the fraternity in service of this political agenda.

  It is difficult to establish whether these men became sadhus as part of the Sangh Parivar’s strategy. None of the sadhus I spoke to admitted to any such plan. They claimed that they had been driven to a spiritual career because of the urge to discover their true selves and free themselves from the cycle of birth and death, and that the ‘ideals’ taught to them by the RSS had helped in this transformation. ‘It didn’t happen because of any planned conversion of swayamsevaks and pracharaks into sanyasis,’ Yatindranand Giri, who rose from the ranks of the RSS to become a sanyasi and then a mahamandaleshwar of Juna akhara, explained to me.1 ‘There is a thin line of demarcation between the life of a pracharak and a sanyasi. Neither of them marries and both live an austere life, and so the transition takes place rather seamlessly the moment a pracharak begins his spiritual quest. Even a swayamsevak has many of the qualities of a pracharak.’

  Until becoming a sanyasi in 1994, Yatindranand Giri was known as Yatindra Nath Sharma. He had worked as a pracharak of the RSS for almost fourteen years, between 1980 and 1994. ‘Since 1990 I started going into trances and
began to have visions of God, and I was finally initiated into sanyas in 1994,’ he said. His preceptor, Satyamitranand Giri, is known as the founder of Haridwar’s famous Bharat Mata temple, which is considered the hub of the VHP’s activities in the region. ‘In 2007, on the insistence of Satyamitranand Giri and Avdheshanand Giri [also Satyamitranand’s disciple and the acharya mahamandaleshwar of Juna akhara], I became one of the mahamandaleshwars of Juna akhara,’ Yatindranand Giri said.

  He is not alone in asserting that a pracharak—or even a swayamsevak—can seamlessly become a sadhu. Religious leaders with an RSS background often claim this, as have VHP leaders, right since its inception in 1964. Swami Chinmayananda, the founder president of the VHP, used to tell RSS members that there was ‘virtually no difference between swayamsevak and sanyasin, except that one is saffron-clothed while the other is in white’.2 Ashok Singhal, one of the best-known leaders of the VHP, described a pracharak similarly, in an interview given to researcher Christophe Jaffrelot in 1990. ‘He wears white clothes but he is a sannyasin. He is a first-class engineer, he has a degree from the BHU [Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi], a top institution, but he never entered in that profession; he has not married. He is not a householder and he is devoting his entire life for the service of Hindu Dharma. Like him there are hundreds of workers of VHP and RSS who are not married, who devote their entire life for the service of Hindu society. They are not in Bhagwa [saffron] dress but they are like sadhus.’3

  Yet, the rise in the phenomenon of RSS cadres embracing sanyas coincided with the VHP’s revival in the early 1980s, when it went all out to deepen its foothold among sadhus. This might be suggestive of the fact that at least a section of these RSS-converts might not have taken sanyas simply to find their true selves but with the clear objective of mustering support from within the Hindu monastic orders for the VHP’s political agenda. A report published in 1982 in the RSS weekly Organiser indicates that at least part of this phenomenon was planned with serious intent.4 Titled ‘Haridwar Makes History’, it recorded that the VHP got 100 of its men initiated as ‘sanyasins’ by ‘seven local historic akharas’ of Haridwar as part of its newly launched ‘Sanskriti Raksha Yojna’. ‘In fact, [the] project marked a dramatic turn in Hindu history when the sanyasins will go to the doors of all Hindu people, irrespective of caste or class status, for preaching of Dharma [religion], instead of the people coming to them,’ the report said. These newly initiated ‘sanyasins’ were deployed in different parts of the country to work among the laity as well as religious leaders. The VHP has since remained silent on whether it pursued this strategy. But, everything that has come to pass suggests that a section of the RSS cadres must have realised the opportunity that lay in the political market of spirituality, which seemed poised for a massive expansion after the VHP re-launched the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in 1984.

  Vijay Kaushal Maharaj, a pracharak-turned-sadhu based in Vrindavan, explained that this was a ‘natural fallout’ of the RSS cadres’ interaction with sadhus in the meetings organised by the VHP. ‘The RSS cadres are already suffused with the desire to serve Hindu religion and culture. When the VHP brought them into contact with the sadhus, many of them must have got so inspired that they might have simply decided to take sanyas.’ He added that his was a similar journey—giving up the life of an RSS pracharak after twenty years in 1989 to take up sanyas and devote his life to Ramkatha, the narration of Lord Ram’s story as religious discourse.5

  II

  No religious leader might have contributed as much to this phenomenon as Haridwar-based sadhu Satyamitranand Giri. Though never a pracharak, he was close to top RSS leaders and was a swayamsevak in his student days.6 Born in a Brahmin family in Agra, he became a sadhu and then, in 1960, at the young age of twenty-eight, was consecrated shankaracharya of Bhanpura peetha in Madhya Pradesh.7 Soon, he developed a transnational spiritual empire with disciples spread across Africa and Europe. Since Dasanami theology did not allow a shankaracharya to travel abroad, he resigned from the post in 1969. Shortly after that, he embarked on a project, which has since been considered central to aligning Indian nationalism with the Hindu religion—the conceptualisation of India in the form of a Hindu goddess. The significance of the project has been recognised by the forefathers of RSS. For instance, Swami Shraddhanand, an Arya Samaj missionary and Hindu Mahasabha leader, was among the first to stress upon the symbolic importance of temples dedicated to ‘Mother India’—Bharat Mata—in promoting a kind of nationalism that identifies exclusively with the Hindu religion. In a book published in 1926, about a year after the RSS was formed, he wrote:

  The first step which I propose is to build one Hindu Rashtra Mandir in at least every city and important town. … The Rashtra Mandir will be in charge of the local Hindu Sabha. … While the sectarian Hindu temples are dominated by their own individual deities, [the Rashtra Mandir] should be devoted to the worship of the three mother-spirits: the Gau-mata, the Saraswati-mata and the Bhumi-mata. Let some living cows be there to represent plenitude. Let ‘Savitri’ be inscribed over the gate of the hall to remind every Hindu of his duty to expel all ignorance and let a life-like map of Mother-bharat be constructed in a prominent place, giving all its characteristics in vivid colours so that every child of the Matri-bhumi may daily bow before the mother and renew his pledge to restore her to the ancient pinnacle of glory from which she has fallen.8

  A temple dedicated to ‘Mother India’ was already constructed in Varanasi in the early 1920s.9 But no one had paid it much attention and this basic Hindutva project remained on the back burner, until it was given a crusading fervour by Satyamitranand Giri. With much fanfare, in 1978, he laid the foundation for the monumental eight-story Bharat Mata temple in Haridwar. The opening of the temple on 15 May 1983 was publicised throughout the country. Advertisements were published in newspapers, inviting ‘all citizens’ to attend the ceremony, and invitations were sent to heads of religious sects and to politicians.10 Five hundred Brahmins performed a Vedic yajna on the occasion of the consecration, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi performed an arti before the statue of Bharat Mata.11

  A hagiographical account of Satyamitranand Giri’s life, written by two of his devotees, Divyalok: Parivrajak Ki Divya Yatra, puts him in the same league as V.D. Savarkar.12 Published in 1986, it contains, among other things, Satyamitranand Giri’s views on Bharat Mata and his teachings, which claim that Bharat is the oldest culture in the world and is the land where God repeatedly chose to incarnate in. Interestingly, instead of being based on the tricoloured Indian national flag, the Bharat Mata temple flies a triangular saffron dhwaja similar to the VHP’s flag. The temple features Savarkar and RSS founder K.B. Hedgewar in a section commemorating Bharat Mata’s ‘illustrious’ sons and daughters—as its signboard describes the display.

  The VHP’s role in organising rallies and yajnas to raise money for the construction of the Bharat Mata temple and Satyamitranand Giri’s long association with the Sangh Parivar are well known in Haridwar. But like most sophisticated gurus, he takes care not to reveal his Hindu supremacist views to the world at large. Lise McKean, who interviewed him in November 1987,13 recalled the encounter thus: ‘I was not given the opportunity to ask the numerous questions I had about his organisation, the Bharat Mata temple, and his involvement with the VHP. After a brief exchange Satyamitranand dismissed me, saying that he was busy preparing for another trip abroad.’ Now in his late eighties, Satyamitranand Giri has simply stopped talking to journalists and researchers, though every day between 4 and 5 p.m. he makes an appearance for his devotees at his residence, located close to the Bharat Mata temple.

  In his long career as a sadhu, Satyamitranand Giri initiated over two dozen disciples into sanyas, most of them after 1986, when, during the Kumbh Mela at Haridwar, he was made mahamandaleshwar by Niranjani akhara. ‘Swami-ji has given sanyas diksha mainly to those disciples whose spiritual prowess combines with a strong nationalistic feeling,’ said Akhileshwaranand Giri, another RSS pra
charak who was also initiated into sanyas by Satyamitranand Giri. ‘That’s why most of his sanyasi disciples have Sangh background. In his student days, Swami-ji had himself worked as a swayamsevak. After becoming a sanyasin, he developed good relations with Golwalkar. All the sarsanghchalaks since Golwalkar, including Mohan Bhagwat [the current chief], have held Swami-ji in high respect.’14

  Ever since Akhileshwaranand Giri became an RSS pracharak in 1989, he has remained attached to the VHP, taking an active part in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and campaigning aggressively against cow slaughter and Christian missionaries. ‘In 1998, at the time of the Haridwar Kumbh Mela, Swami Satyamitranand Giri initiated me into sanyas. After that I shifted my base from Haridwar to Jabalpur [Madhya Pradesh]. My status in the VHP also changed. Till then I had participated in the activities of the VHP in the capacity of a pracharak of the RSS, but after becoming a sadhu, I started representing the sadhu community and became a member of the VHP’s Kendriya Margdarshak Mandal,’ he said. ‘In 2010, following the advice of Swami Satyamitranand Giri, I became a mahamandaleshwar of Niranjani akhara. In 2016, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan [of BJP] made me the chairman of the Cow Protection Board of Madhya Pradesh, and I got the status of a minister in the state. Now I divide my time between Jabalpur and Bhopal.’ In December 2018, six months after I interviewed him, the BJP was defeated by the Congress in the Madhya Pradesh assembly elections and Akhileshwaranand Giri lost his ministership.

  Akhileshwaranand and Yatindranand Giri are among the four most prominent sanyasi disciples of Satyamitranand Giri. The other two are Avdheshanand Giri and Govind Dev Giri. The latter resides in Pune and has set up a string of Ved Vidyalayas for teaching Vedic knowledge, in several parts of northern and western India. ‘While Avdheshanand Giri was a swayamsevak, Govind Dev Giri was a pracharak before taking sanyas,’ said Akhileshwaranand Giri. These disciples of Satyamitranand Giri, in their capacity as preceptors, have in turn been instrumental in initiating the RSS cadres into sanyas. One of Yatindranand Giri’s disciples, for instance, is Prabodhanand Giri, a former RSS pracharak who now runs a Hindu militia organisation called Hindu Raksha Sena from his ashram in Haridwar.