Initially, I focused on the Vaishnava akharas in Ayodhya, to study the effect of this nexus on the sadhus. But I quickly realised that I would have to extend my research to Shaiva sadhus, who have had a relatively longer association with the VHP, and mostly live in Haridwar, Rishikesh, Varanasi and Allahabad, which, at the time of the Kumbh Melas, becomes a powerful magnet for those scrambling to corner the biggest share of the new politico-spiritual market.
Their engagement with the Hindu Right is not solely responsible for the present-day malaise of the akharas. The new circumstances have simply exacerbated this greed for wealth and power.
Over the next few years, I made my way layer by layer inside the akharas, those of both Shaivas and Vaishnavas, traversing the ruins left in the wake of their association with Hindutva politics.
The making of the Hindu vote has taken a huge toll on the akharas. These decades of interplay with Hindutva politics has provoked a number of crises, and opportunities, in their world. My attempt to collect information about life in the akharas—the intricacies of power plays, the manoeuvres required to keep their ascetic image intact, including deriving legitimacy from Kumbh Melas, and their pursuit of personal and institutional ambitions and rivalries—was initially weighed down by a sense of frustration that there was so little known, and hardly anything written, about all this.
The available literature on nagas and akharas can be categorised into two sorts. At one end of the spectrum is a survey of their history, rituals and belief systems. At the other extreme are books either completely devotional in nature or written with a certain degree of awe. Even the coffee-table picture books and magazine photo-essays do not seek to explain anything more than what is visible on the surface.
As I delved deeper, I understood that beneath the ascetic conformity there are eddies of activity, some quite vigorous, that nourish more interesting lifestyles—of sadhus working under the patronage of Hindutva politics, who have found ways to mould parts of the system to their advantage. The changed system created new circumstances, and even the the most stoic of sadhus could not remain unaffected by the games their brothers played.
So far, no attempt has been made to venture into the disturbing darkness of the akharas and there has been no serious public discussion on naga sadhus. The focus on the making of political Hinduism has been so glaring that the unmaking of the world of Hindu monastic orders has remained obscure.
This book seeks to lift up the trapdoor. It examines why and how the darkness is kept alive, who benefits from it and who does not, of the lives trapped within and the logic that keeps them locked in.
1
MURDER IN A HOLY CITY
The moment had finally come. His mouth and nostrils were crushed under immense weight. A searing pain shot through his body as he made one last attempt to breathe. ‘Then,’ Ram Asare Das, a naga vairagi of Ayodhya, explained to me two years after the incident, ‘just when it seemed futile to struggle anymore, Lord Hanuman appeared before me in all his glory. I clung to him and begged him to save me. Immediately, I felt energy surge through my hands and legs. With a push, I freed myself from the deadly hold, jumped off my bed and ran from the temple, screaming.’1
How Ram Asare Das, who was eighty-eight years old then, could have gathered such strength that night in 2011 is unclear.
Almost nothing is known about the visitor in his room that night. It was pitch dark, and Ram Asare Das could not see the face of the man who tried to suffocate him. It seemed like a professional job. He was convinced that Brijmohan Das, his young disciple who had dethroned him as the mahant, or abbot, of Chauburji temple and claimed the post for himself, was behind it. Ever since Ram Asare Das was ousted, Brijmohan Das had wanted to get rid of him, not least because Ram Asare Das was determined to regain his old authority.
After he fled the Chauburji temple, Ram Asare Das led a wanderer’s life, with no permanent place to stay in Ayodhya. Yet, he never considered returning to the temple he had ruled as a mahant for several decades, fearing for his life. Brijmohan Das was also the city president of the VHP and held a lot of sway.
Housed in a 7.5-acre sprawling campus in the Ramkot locality, Chauburji is one of the several fortress-like Hindu religious establishments that dot Ayodhya. The temple owns real estate properties worth crores of rupees. The massive idol of a sleeping Hanuman is its main attraction. Sadhus like Brijmohan Das claim that this was the site where king Dasarath, the father of Lord Ram and the mythical king of Ayodhya, administered justice from, and even the registered name of the temple is Dasarath Gaddi. This kind of exaggeration is, in fact, in the nature of Ayodhya, where Ramanandi vairagis point to one temple as the spot where Lord Ram was born, to another as the place where he played as a child, to still another as the temple where the pushpak viman had landed, carrying him and his consort Sita back home after defeating the demon king Ravana, and so on and so forth. And for sharing this kind of ‘information’, the nagas exact a liberal fee from the willing listener.
Until he was ousted from Chauburji, Ram Asare Das, too, used to make such claims. But now, asked whether Dasarath had indeed administered justice from this temple, he laughed. ‘What puzzles me is how Lord Ram came to be born in a place that is full of crooks,’ he said. ‘Perhaps gods are born where there are too many sinners.’
Ram Asare Das came to Ayodhya in the late Fifties from his native place Gopalganj in Bihar. ‘Right from the beginning I lived in Hanumangarhi along with my guru, Mahant Sitaram Das, and soon became a naga vairagi. Later, along with my guru, I shifted to an old temple in Ramkot area. It used to be a dilapidated structure but had huge tracts of donated land in its name. After the death of my guru, I became its mahant,’ he said. Ram Asare Das claimed that he oversaw the construction of a magnificent temple in 1984 and named it Dasarath Gaddi. In Ayodhya, however, it is called Chauburji, named after the circular towers in the four corners along its imposing walls.
Ram Asare Das claimed that Brijmohan Das was not his disciple but used to stay in the temple with his father who worked there. ‘The temple had several cases against it, and I was too old to do the kind of running around required. I trusted Brijmohan Das and asked him to look after these cases. About three years ago [in 2010], I gave him the power of attorney to handle the cases. But I learnt later that he had conned me into signing papers that registered the mahantship of the temple in his name. I was not aware of this. For a year after the signing of these papers, he did not say anything. Then he started telling me that I had no right to stay there and that I must leave the temple. After that night’s incident, I decided to leave the place forever.’
Brijmohan Das, who had secured complete control over the temple and its properties, denied having tried to kill his guru or expropriating the mahantship through deception. ‘During his last days in the temple, my guru started playing into the hands of Ayodhya’s land mafia and he wanted to sell all the properties of the temple. I didn’t allow this and that’s why he is levelling all kinds of charges against me,’ he alleged.2
When Brijmohan Das’s version of the story was presented to Ram Asare Das, he argued, ‘I constructed it. How could I think of giving it away to the land mafia? The charges are baseless. He is trying to divert attention from the crime he has committed.’
In any case, Ram Asare Das is among the luckier mahants in Ayodhya, where murdering gurus is the order of the day in the fight to grab temples and ashrams. When I asked why he hadn’t returned to Chauburji temple, Ram Asare Das shuddered involuntarily. ‘Last time I was saved because of divine intervention. But that may not happen again.’
For some time after leaving the temple, Ram Asare Das kept running from one mahant to another, hoping they would come forward to support him. But in Ayodhya there is nothing so ex as an ex-mahant. So long as an ascetic heads a temple, all doors remain open for him, but the moment he is ousted, he stops getting invitation even for religious feasts, like the bhandaras. ‘It was amazing,’ he said. ‘I even went to the akhara [he be
longs to Nirvani akhara], but no one came forward to help me. All those who mattered in Ayodhya seemed to have been bought by Brijmohan Das, who had by then become the city president of VHP.’
When nothing happened, Ram Asare Das left Ayodhya and moved to a temple in his native place Gopalganj. However, he regularly visited Ayodhya, hoping, despite all odds, that one day he would be able to get back his empire. In mid-2017, when he was close to turning 100 years old, he finally gave up, and, accepting his fate, reached a compromise with his tormentor, who allowed him to live in a corner of the Chauburji temple, where Ram Asare Das breathed his last on 8 February 2018.
Underneath the veneer of divinity lie stories of bloody successions in temples and ashrams—especially those that have immense landed properties donated by the nawabs of Awadh and other princely states during the colonial era—that reveal Ayodhya as the lawless killing field of sadhus.
II
The relationship between a guru and a chela, which is at the heart of Ramanandi akharas, is underlaid with turbulence. Outsiders might not see this or skim over it—because of the veil of religion—but anybody with even a surface view of the akharas cannot remain blind to it. It even finds a mention in Ayodhya’s folklore:
Charan dabaa ke sant bane hain,
gardan dabaa mahant;
Paramparaa sab bhool gaye hain,
bhool gayen hain granth;
De do inko bhi kuchh gyaan,
dharaa par ek baar tum phir aao, Hey Ram.
(He became a sadhu by massaging feet,
And a mahant by choking a throat;
They have forgotten the traditions
and the scriptures;
Enlighten them
Come down to earth one more time, O Ram.)
Most sadhus of Ayodhya I spoke to agree that this violent streak was exacerbated around the mid-1980s, soon after the VHP pushed the Ram Janmabhoomi issue to the fore. The VHP, for almost two decades after its inception in 1964, had been unable to use the sadhus in creating a favourable electoral condition for the BJP. This failure led the RSS to re-launch the VHP in the early 1980s with the prime motive of spearheading a new political strategy.
The Ram Janmabhoomi issue had been almost forgotten after the few months of commotion that it generated following the surreptitious idol-planting of 1949.3 Until that night, Ramchabutara—an elevated platform of 17x21x6 feet, located about 100 paces from the Babri masjid inside its outer courtyard—was treated as the birthplace of Lord Ram. All attempts by naga vairagis to build a temple over Ramchabutara had failed because the British government had imposed a restraint on any construction work in the Babri masjid campus. India’s independence was perceived by some of the Hindu Mahasabha’s prominent leaders and the nagas in Ayodhya as a removal of that restraint. In the atmosphere of bitterness created by the communal clashes that took place in the wake of Partition, a group of Ramanandi nagas and Hindu Mahasabha leaders succeeded in capturing the whole of Babri masjid. But once the idol was planted, the turmoil gave way to legal battles and the issue remained politically dormant for over three decades, until the RSS saw an opportunity in it.
In early 1984, the VHP organised its first Dharma Sansad in Delhi, which unanimously adopted a resolution demanding the ‘liberation’ of the birthplace of Lord Ram.4 In July that year, the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Mukti Yajna Samiti (Committee to Liberate Ram’s Birthplace) was founded. On 1 October, the VHP established its militant wing, Bajrang Dal, under the leadership of Vinay Katiyar, who had been an RSS pracharak since 1980. As the VHP’s main strike force, the Bajrang Dal was tasked with ‘liberating’ the ‘Ram temple’, as Babri masjid has been called ever since the idol of Lord Ram was planted in it in 1949. A procession was set off from Sitamarhi in Bihar for this purpose, and it reached Ayodhya on 6 October. The focal point of the procession was a lorry bearing large statues of Ram and Sita beneath a banner with the slogan ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’.5
Peter van der Veer describes how the response to the procession in Ayodhya was marked by extreme indifference: ‘As far as I could see only some five to seven thousand people had come to listen to the speeches. This seemed a disappointing number … The Hindu press was not taken aback by this number, however, and inflated it to fifty thousand and in some papers even to a hundred thousand, numbers which were taken over by the national press.’6
After halting in Ayodhya for a day, the procession started for Lucknow to present a petition to the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. The Ramanandi nagas’ largely unenthusiastic response in Ayodhya frustrated the VHP and the participating sadhus; van der Veer records it thus: ‘Some of Ayodhya’s sadhus had accompanied the procession to Lucknow and told, after their return, that it had had a far greater success in Lucknow and in the places on the way than in Ayodhya itself.’7
It was an unnerving time for the VHP. The lack of support from the ascetic community of Ayodhya, the epicentre of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, threatened to disrupt its new agenda. The VHP had devoted many months and all the resources under its command to raise the pitch of the campaign in order to mobilise Hindus in general and Ayodhya’s ascetic community in particular—a critical component for the success of its plans. The VHP’s campaign in Ayodhya was conducted by a handful of Ramanandi vairagis who had little support from the rest of the community, and, in the end, not much was accomplished.
In the months that followed, progress continued to elude the VHP. In the last week of November 1984, for example, Ayodhya witnessed three Ramayan Melas, gatherings at which the Ramayana would be recited. Two of them were organised by the government and the third by the VHP’s point man in Ayodhya, Ramchandradas Paramhansa, the shri mahant, or chief abbot, of the Digambar akhara, the smallest of the three main Ramanandi akharas of the Vaishnava sect. ‘While the two Melas organized by the Congress (I) governments [both at the Center and state] were reasonably well attended, Ramchandradas’s Mela was an abject failure,’ writes Peter van der Veer.8
Partly because of this inability of the VHP to expand its network among the naga vairagis of Ayodhya, it set up a Ram Janmabhoomi Trust and conferred its chairmanship on Jagat Guru Ramanandacharya Shivaramacharya, head of the Ramanandis of Varanasi, the holy town located close to Ayodhya. It was a shrewd move, because Shivaramacharya, said to command immense respect throughout Vaishnava circles, would help swing the majority of Ramanandis to the VHP, particularly in Ayodhya. Having set up the trust, with which BJP leader Vijaya Raje Scindia and a number of corporate representatives, like G.P. Birla, G.H. Singhania, K.N. Modi and R.N. Goenka, were associated, the VHP called on the government to transfer the property rights of the disputed site in Ayodhya to the trust so that the ‘biggest temple in the world’ could be built there.9
Soon, however, it became clear that even Shivaramacharya could not ensure the kind of foothold the VHP required in Ayodhya. The movement met with greater enthusiasm in other parts of Uttar Pradesh and, in fact, got a fillip following the order in early 1986 by a district and sessions judge in Faizabad—the district that houses Ayodhya—that the Uttar Pradesh government should unlock the gates of the Babri masjid–Ram Janmabhoomi temple to enable devotees to offer darshan and puja in the disputed structure. But the movement was still not particularly successful at the local level in Ayodhya,10 and this seemed to get on the VHP’s nerves.
The Ram Janmabhoomi movement gave the temples of Ayodhya a keener edge and the local mahants an exalted position. Getting these temples and their mahants on board was a political necessity for the RSS and the VHP if they wanted to present themselves as leader of the Ram Janmabhoomi ‘liberation’ movement. The VHP knew that, it could not authentically act as a representative voice for Indian sadhus or for the ‘cause’, if the mahants of Ayodhya did not fall in line.
The VHP desperately needed pliable mahants in Ayodhya’s temples. For ambitious ascetics, this provided a new opportunity as well as readily available help to accrue material prospects or grab lucrative mahantships in Ayodhya. And in this little-studied in
ternal history lies the unravelling of the sadhus. The VHP’s role in creating a killing field in Ayodhya has remained hidden.
‘The VHP has trained the sadhus of Ayodhya to achieve anything through crime,’ says Raghunandan Das, the mahant of Satsang Ashram temple at Swargadwar in Ayodhya. He was part of the VHP’s procession in 1984 and headed the procession in Darbhanga district of Bihar. Three decades later he admits: ‘In the name of temple movement, the VHP singlehandedly destroyed the tranquillity of Ayodhya. Violence, moneypower and political influence were used openly by it to get favourable mahants installed in the temples here. Goons in the garb of sadhus became powerful. Old and vulnerable mahants became victims. The dignity that the sadhus of Ayodhya have lost, because of the VHP’s direct or indirect interference in deciding successions in temples here, can never be reclaimed.’
As Ayodhya moved from the 1980s to 1990s, punctuated by the massive shock it received on 6 December 1992, when Babri masjid was eventually demolished, the power and prestige attached to a mahant in Ayodhya shot up. This was partly because the VHP and its sister organisations, after having overseen the demolition of the mosque, hastened the installation of pliable mahants in the temples of Ayodhya, and partly because the scramble for mahantship created a suitable ground for the entry of hardened criminals from the nearby areas of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar looking for safe havens. Together, they vitiated the atmosphere in Ayodhya even further. Over time, the situation deteriorated so much that today only a mahant with a band of armed goons of his own can feel safe. And even that cannot guarantee safety.
‘It would be stupid to pretend that politics has no role in it,’ fugitive mahant Ram Asare Das told me. ‘During the last three decades, such incidents have increased exponentially. Earlier, elder mahants used to be respected, but ever since the Ram temple movement was revived, the mahants of Ayodhya have lived in constant fear. The mahantship has now become a business here. Not just my temple, the VHP has been instrumental in getting its own men installed as mahants in several other temples of Ayodhya.’
Ascetic Games Page 3
