Ascetic Games

by Dhirendra K Jha

  Without the context of this rivalry, the clash of 25 November will seem like a trifle blown out of proportion. On the surface, it appeared to have been triggered by Gyan Das’s refusal to allow Dharam Das and his henchmen to take part in the funeral procession of a naga vairagi. But this was merely an excuse for the two groups to engage in a fist fight. If not this, they would have erupted over some other equally trivial issue.

  The trigger that day was the death of naga Makhsudan Das, also called Shukul Baba. He belonged to the same patti as Gyan Das—Sagaria patti—but the two had never been on good terms. Shukul Baba’s asan in Hanumangarhi was right opposite Gyan Das’s residence. ‘During his last days, Shukul Baba stopped moving around. He was usually seen seated outside his asan in complete silence, interspersed only by abuses hurled at Gyan Das,’ said Ajit Das. Predictably, Shukul Baba was respected by the dissidents in Hanumangarhi and not by the followers of Gyan Das.

  Upon their death, nagas are smeared with salt and then either buried seated in the meditation posture or are immersed in a sacred river tied to a rock or a sack full of sand to weigh the body down. Nagas believe cremation to be superfluous for them as they have already ‘burnt’ their attachments through ascetic initiation, opting for a life of austerity and renunciation.19 In Ayodhya, a naga vairagi is immersed in the Sarayu, the river that flows by the town.

  But in the broil over the right to attend Shukul Baba’s funeral, the first casualty was the old man’s corpse.

  It all began around eight in the morning and ended within an hour. Brisk early-hour trade was on in the shops around Hanumangarhi, and devotees, mostly from the rural surroundings of Ayodhya and nearby districts of Uttar Pradesh, had flocked there in large numbers for a darshan of Hanuman. It was like any other morning in the temple complex, until Dharam Das’s men, after a few minutes of abusive verbal exchanges with Gyan Das’s men, dashed to the bamboo tikhti, unmindful of Shukul Baba’s body. Within minutes, all the bamboo poles from the tikhti were in the hands of these successors of warrior ascetics. Shopkeepers ran away in panic, many of them without even pulling down the shutters of their shops, and devotees fled leaving behind their belongings. And when Dharam Das’s nephew and disciple Ajit Das entered the mayhem with his wrestler’s body, even the corpse became a weapon, and the battle took a bizarre turn.

  ‘Around eight that morning, while I was riding my horse [which he claimed to do without fail every morning], my guru summoned me,’ recalled Ajit Das. ‘A young naga sent by my guru from Hanumangarhi told me that the body of Shukul Baba would soon be carried for immersion in the Sarayu and that we would have to be part of the funeral procession.When someone dies, the tradition in Hanumangarhi is that the nagas of all the pattis participate in the funeral procession. It is not exclusive to any patti.’

  Ajit Das wasted no time and immediately steered his horse in the direction of Hanumangarhi. There he saw Dharam Das and his followers engaged in a verbal duel with Gyan Das, who was seated on the elevated veranda of his house. ‘As I jumped off my horse, I saw nearly a dozen of Gyan Das’s goons carrying rods and cycle chains rushing towards my guru and his supporters, who were unarmed. With lightning speed, my guru’s followers snatched the bamboo poles from the tikhti. By the time I got close to them, there were no bamboo poles left for me, and I had nothing to protect myself with. So I lifted the dead body and started swinging it with all the strength I had,’ he recounted.

  ‘Instead of running away, we faced them bravely. Soon we forced them back. Then they ran to the veranda of Gyan Das’s house and started pelting stones and bricks at us. We threw these back at them with equal force.’

  Gyan Das watched helplessly from the veranda. Dharam Das and his supporters seemed to be gaining an upper hand in the fight, and Gyan Das had never faced a defeat since he began his reign in Hanumangarhi over a decade ago. He could probably see his empire beginning to weaken. Till then, no one had even dared lift their heads to meet his eyes. But now, the choicest of abuses were being hurled at him, and he could do nothing.

  ‘We shouted at him, abused him and dared him to come down, but he remained silent as if he had suffered an electric shock,’ said Ajit Das. When Gyan Das could take it no more and attempted to go down to join the fight, his security guards, arranged for by the government as he was the president of the Akhara Parishad, held him back.

  The news of the clash spread like wildfire in Ayodhya and the town braced for a blood bath. But the police reached the spot on time and were also immediately deployed across Ayodhya. The police also managed to take possession of Shukul Baba’s body, which they immersed in the Sarayu.

  Although no one died, close to two dozen nagas were injured. A dozen each from both the sides were taken into custody and sent to Faizabad jail. This included Dharam Das but not Gyan Das, who managed to get his name out of the First Information Report (FIR). Both sides filed cross cases under Section 307 (attempt to murder) of the Indian Penal Code.

  VI

  The fight, which lasted only an hour, entered the legal arena, and Gyan Das appeared to retain his position of power, but a statement had been made. For the first time since the late 1990s, he no longer seemed invincible. Though he was still the uncrowned king of Hanumangarhi, the shocking defeat at the hands of a small group of nagas became the main talking point in Ayodhya. Dharam Das emerged as the new nucleus, and gradually all the nagas who felt victimised by Gyan Das started to drift towards him.

  ‘Gyan Das used to be a despot till he suffered defeat that morning. I am not saying that it changed him completely, but it turned him into a somewhat milder version of what he used to be before that incident,’ said Ajit Das, who became a naga in 1992 and had witnessed Gyan Das’s reign right from the beginning. ‘In those days, the panchayati system held no meaning for him. He used to decide all the important matters in Hanumangarhi. He used to enforce his decisions through his clique, which included all those holding significant posts in Hanumangarhi. Ordinary nagas had no option but to prostrate before him. The slightest of suspicions used to evoke the hardest of punishments in Hanumangarhi. Expulsion of nagas was the order of the day.’

  The most invoked statute of Hanumangarhi’s niyamawali is Rule 17. This rule states: ‘Sadhus of Hanumangarhi are nihamga [unmarried]. According to the customs and traditions, they cannot marry and may not have any connection with women. As per the consensus of the majority, they would be at once turned out and expelled when any doubt of this nature is raised.’20 It is impossible for any naga to prove his innocence if the majority does not support him.

  Hanumangarhi owns immense immoveable properties in Ayodhya as well as other parts of north India. Although on paper these assets are divided in the name of four pattis, in practice their management has always been a matter of contention, and frequent litigations are a fact of life here. The management of these properties has, therefore, remained a lucrative affair for those who have wielded power in the past.

  The office of the pujari of the Hanuman temple is almost as sought after as that of the shri mahant. As per the panchayati rule, every patti appoints a pujari for a year, so that each year four priests are in service. Only an upper-caste naga is eligible to perform a puja. If the appointed priest is not from the upper caste, then an upper-caste naga performs the puja in place of the priest. A naga’s chances of coming in line for the pujariship depends on his seniority in the asan and the number of asans in a tok. Thus, in every patti, this right alternates among the three jamats. When a jamat’s turn comes, the right is given in turn to one of the two toks and within a tok to one of the asans, where the principle of seniority is followed. The post is lucrative because it is the pujari who collects the daily offerings made to the deity. He uses this income to meet the expenses of the temple, including food rations allotted to the pattis, called ser-siddha, and repairs to the temple building. The temple, needless to say, sees vast amounts of offerings on a daily basis.

  Whether it was the management of Hanumangarhi’s properties or
the appointment of pujaris, the final word used to lie with Gyan Das. Until that November morning.

  Hanumangarhi is one of the few complexes that houses such a large number of nagas on a permanent basis. A majority of these nagas are wrestlers and ferocious fighters. This ensures that outsiders do not interfere in its affairs. The nagas of this complex, on the other hand, have made it their right to meddle in everything that happens in Ayodhya. As such, Gyan Das’s authority, during his heyday, extended over all of Ayodhya.

  The emergence of a de facto king is not a new phenomenon in Hanumangarhi. The baithak of the Nirvani akhara has seen a series of naga despots, many of whom ended up being killed in gang rivalries. The reigns of such naga despots has become so frequent in the last few decades, that the term ‘shahi-ship’—the reign of a shah or a king—has become common parlance among Ayodhya’s nagas. The first of these despots was Bajrang Das, who, after a few years of his shahi-ship, was murdered sometime in the early 1970s. Thereafter began the shahi-ship of Ramkhelawan Das, a naga of Hanumangarhi who had been accused in a high-profile murder.

  The baithak of Nirvani akhara gradually became the headquarters of organised crime in the region. Criminality became a symbol of power and many naga residents of Hanumangarhi began pledging their allegiance to anyone who was willing and had the ability to bend the rules to suit a group’s interests.

  This change in the ethos was also accelerated by the murder of Bihar’s most dreaded gangster Kamdeo Singh. He was killed in a police encounter in 1980 in his native village in Begusarai, a district close to Patna. Singh used to share a good rapport with the mahants of the Bhumihar caste—a land-owning upper caste in north India—in Ayodhya and, particularly, Hanumangarhi. After his death, his gang members dispersed and many found shelter as nagas in Hanumangarhi. The new entrants brought with them a more aggressive criminal mindset as well as new kinds of firearms, which had till then been unfamiliar to the naga vairagis. Later that year, the shahi-ship of Harbhajan Das of Sagaria patti came to an abrupt end after he was shot dead by his own disciples and supporters.

  Around the mid-1980s, Hanumangarhi witnessed the rise of a new organised gang led by Ramkripal Das, who was originally a resident of Munger in Bihar and was attached to Ujjainia patti. The VHP, struggling to find a foothold in Ayodhya, backed him, but he had other plans. Under him began a new era of murder, extortion, kidnapping and intimidation that continued for almost a decade. It was the longest shahi-ship thus far. He was killed in 1997, and it is widely believed by the residents that someone from Hanumangarhi had hired one of the top gangsters of Uttar Pradesh to eliminate him.

  After his death, though gangs became fractured into smaller units that functioned in isolation, the shahi-ship of Hanumangarhi passed on to Gyan Das. In many ways, his stranglehold on Hanumangarhi surpassed that of his predecessors. A vast network of his men, all young nagas, efficiently manned every nook and corner of the complex, while those who occupied official positions meekly carried out all his instructions. The mahants of all four pattis as well as the gaddi-nashin, the titular head of Hanumangarhi under the panchayati system, were under his control; the panchan, or the decision-making group of elders, existed only in name.

  ‘After the fight, Gyan Das seems to have loosened his grip of Hanumangarhi,’ said Ajit Das. ‘Rotation and seniority have once again become important in decision-making processes. The panchayati system seems to be back on track.’

  Yet the source of Gyan Das’s strength—his vehement opposition to the VHP, which resulted in attracting political backing from the Samajwadi Party and Congress; his network of loyal nagas of Hanumangarhi; and his position as the president of All India Akhara Parishad—remains more or less intact even after that face-off. He continues to wield power, though with lesser impact.

  VII

  Remarkably, Dharam Das survived Gyan Das’s reign of repression. Born in 1945 in Dumari village of Bihar’s Buxar district, he came to Ayodhya in his teens. His preceptor, Abhiram Das—who planted the Ram idol in Babri masjid—introduced him to wrestling early on, as per Hanumangarhi’s tradition.21 In no time, Dharam Das started getting noticed for his excellent performance in the akhara’s wrestling pit. When his preceptor grew old, Dharam Das started wrestling under the guidance of Harishankar Das, a famous wrestler and ustaad of Gyan Das as well.

  Much later, when Dharam Das and Gyan Das were locked in a fierce rivalry, Harishankar Das sided with Dharam Das, even though he used to favour Gyan Das in the wrestling pit.

  Initially, Dharam Das stayed away from the politics of Hanumangarhi’s nagas. He had the special blessings of Abhiram Das, who liked him much more than his other two disciples: Satyendra Das and Ramvilas Das. While these two disciples spent more time studying Sanskrit and the Vedas, the latter even added ‘Vedanti’ to his name, Dharam Das, much to the liking of his guru, preferred to practise wrestling. Once, Dharam Das expressed his desire to study along with Satyendra Das, but his guru denied him permission saying, ‘Ninety-eight percent Indians are illiterate; only 2 per cent are intellectuals. Therefore, it is better to lead the majority than to wander among intellectuals like a fool.’

  It is not surprising that Abhiram Das made Dharam Das his successor. On 10 July 1981—nearly five months before his death—Abhiram Das willed all his moveable and immoveable properties to Dharam Das. Twelve days after Abhiram Das’s death on 3 December 1981, prominent nagas and mahants of Hanumangarhi signed a mahazarnama declaring Dharam Das the successor of Abhiram Das.

  Once he became the mahant of his guru’s asan, Dharam Das zealously pursued the legacy of Abhiram Das. In 1984, when the VHP was relaunched and adopted the Ram Janmabhoomi issue as its central theme, he drifted towards it. Soon thereafter, he attacked and vandalised the Ramchabutara, because his guru had placed Lord Ram’s idol beneath the central dome of the mosque, turning it into the ‘real’ Janmabhoomi. The Ramchabutara was under the control of the Nirmohi akhara. A case was filed against Dharam Das and he had to spend a few months in jail. Once out of jail, he was once again actively involved in the VHP’s activities. In 1989, he became one of the petitioners in the Ram Janmabhoomi–Babri masjid case and was an active participant in the demolition of the mosque. His name also figured in the Central Bureau of Investigation’s charge sheet that listed nearly two dozen accused, including VHP leaders Acharya Giriraj Kishore, Ashok Singhal and Mahant Avaidyanath and the BJP’s L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharati, for conspiring to demolish the mosque.

  During the 1990s, when politics became a difficult ball game for Dharam Das, he chose a different route. As mentioned before, he not only mobilised the nagas belonging to his own caste but also exploited the division between Biharis and non-Biharis, which began to widen once Gyan Das—a non-Bihari—became the supreme authority in Hanumangarhi.

  The clash in November proved that Dharam Das had carved a niche for himself, and the new group that he led, though small in size as compared to Gyan Das’s vast network of loyalists, was no less fierce in its approach and was known for its ability and desire to settle matters by violent means.

  VIII

  When these two rival gangs—a dozen each—had to be locked up after the clash, the Faizabad jail authorities were in for a hard time. The fearsome nagas, known for breaking rules, created chaos in the jail from the very beginning—they entered shouting abuses at each other.

  Dharam Das led his confident and jeering naga supporters inside the prison, while Gyan Das’s men were without their leader as he hadn’t been arrested. ‘First we occupied the open space under a huge banyan tree in the centre of the jail’s central courtyard,’ said Ajit Das, who was taken into custody as well. This space soon became the kitchen for Dharam Das’s group. Stove, LPG cylinders, raw materials for cooking—milk, curd, ghee, mustard oil, spices, salt, sugar, etc.—were brought in from outside and a ferocious commune started operating there. Bewildered by the new set of prisoners, the jail authorities had to take refuge in their manuals, which provided for sepa
rate cooking facilities for sadhus.

  In contrast, Gyan Das’s men, who lived in a separate camp some ten metres from the one marked for their opponents, tried not to provoke Dharam Das and his men, who were aggressive and seemed ready to do anything to protect their newly acquired status. Gyan Das’s men spent most of their time inside the barracks. ‘Abhay Singh, a dreaded gangster from the region, was in the same barracks. Our opponents remained huddled under his protection,’ Ajit Das said. Singh had been a BJP member in 2005. Later, he joined the Samajwadi Party and became an MLA from Gosainganj in Faizabad in the 2012 state elections.

  Weeks later, when the nagas came out on bail, Dharam Das’s men retained their aggressive attitude to deter Gyan Das’s gang. The deadlock continued for a few months, till the two sides started gearing up for another confrontation in the run up to the Allahabad Ardh Kumbh, scheduled to begin on 14 January 2007. Dharam Das, whose claim for the post of shri mahant was still pending, sought an order from the court to prevent the reigning shri mahant Shivnandan Das from leading the shahi julus, the royal procession for the royal bath, in the Kumbh. He argued that since Shivnandan Das had become shri mahant before the first shahi snan of the 1995 Ardh Kumbh, his twelve-year term would come to an end before the first shahi snan in 2007.

  In the Kumbh and Ardh Kumbh assemblages at Allahabad, there is a shahi julus on each of the three main bathing occasions—Makar Sankranti, Mauni Amavasya and Vasant Panchami. In 2007, these occasions fell on 14, 19 and 23 January, respectively.

  The advocate of Shivnandan Das and Gyan Das for this case, Varma said, ‘When the Ardh Kumbh approached, Dharam Das filed one writ petition after another in the Allahabad High Court to expedite the case pending in Faizabad’s civil court. At the instance of the high court, the arguments in this case took place on a daily basis in January 2007 and continued up to Vasant Panchami.’