01 September 2013, 02:16 PM IST
After trying to hood-wink law enforcers on one bizarre pretext or the other, Asaram, the high-profile, if controversial, guru is finally in their custody. He had first refused to meet them to receive a summons to be questioned for his alleged misbehaviour with a minor girl until he had finished his meditation. It lasted for close to ten hours. He then dashed from destination to destination to address his followers, upbraid the media, take pot-shots at his political adversaries and, not least, to cast aspersions on the character and motives of his alleged victim ( 'mentally unstable' ) and her father( 'publicity hound' ). Much of this happened under the watch of the law enforcers.
When they finally summoned the nerve to go for the jugular, the guru bared his fangs: he would turn himself in, he proclaimed, only after he had fulfilled his back-to-back public engagements. But his son, a caricature of filial piety, argued that his dear papa suffered from high blood pressure and even from a neurological disorder and would therefore agree to be interrogated once he was in fine fettle. The contradiction between the two statements was glaring to observers. But it made no difference to the father-son duo nor, it appears, to the flock of the faithful.
The arrest of Asaram will, first and foremost, come as a relief to the teenager and her father. Their courage to take on a powerful figure, who claims a following that runs into several million pious individuals, has been exemplary. Sustaining them in this risky endeavour has been the media. Reporters braved taunts and insults and even physical intimidation to cover this dreadful story from every conceivable angle. This is a moment of professional triumph for them and for TV anchors and analysts who drove home the point again and again that the powers-that-be had been treating the guru with velvet gloves.
Eye-brows have been raised about this lenient treatment. The Congress 'high command'- and its satraps in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and elsewhere – preferred, at least in the early stages of this episode – to remain uncharacteristically coy. From all accounts, the coyness must be seen in the context of one of the scourges of electoral politics: vote-banks. In the states going to the polls between now and the end of the year, no political party wants to be seen to alienate the god man's following. Their 'hurt sentiments' need to be taken into account. Or so they reckon.
But the ones who have egg on their face are the leading lights of the BJP at the national and state levels. The obsequious remarks they have made in the past about Asaram have gone viral on You tube. The ones supporting him made after he was charged with sexual assault of a minor girl will continue to haunt them for long. Uma Bharati and Praveen Togadia face an embarrassing prospect: they will have to eat crow. The saving grace for the sangh parivar is a report that Narendra Modi has asked his party's workers to desist from adding their voices to the chorus of the guru's followers absolving him of any misconduct.
The ones who are certain to be most aggrieved about Asaram's arrest are his followers. They held him in utter awe. Each word that dropped from his lips was music to their ears. Each sermon he delivered was regarded as a divinely-inspired diktat. Each course of action he recommended was akin to a fatwa. Each prescription to cure an ailment – physical or psychic – was seen as the last word on the subject. Now, after witnessing his self-serving ways to evade the law, they know better. And the knowledge devastates them.
Some of the faithful will continue to buy his line that he – and not the minor girl – is the true victim. This is no surprise at all. The power of blind faith should never be under-estimated. But many of the other followers are bound to be troubled. They are the ones who parted with their meagre earnings for the causes he espoused – which enabled him to build his humongous real estate empire. They entrusted their wives and sisters and daughters to his care. They bought his pills and powders, recited his mantras, read his literature. In a word, they trusted him. Now that trust lies in ruins.
Yet, Asaram, despite his conceits, deserves to be treated like any other citizen who is accused of transgressing the law of the land. He is – and will remain – innocent unless the courts prove him otherwise. By that same token, he doesn't deserve any special treatment simply because of his stature – a stature that comes clothed in religion and spirituality. A swift, fair and transparent trial will settle the issue one way or the other. Until then, all those who believe in the cause of justice must not lower their guard. This is indeed what several dispensers of spiritual knowledge in our country also seek. They are aghast, and rightly so, that one man's alleged misdeeds have equated spiritual yearning in our deeply religious country with quackery, greed and moral turpitude.
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