Sri Sri, India needs security for women, not building your stage
Almost eight years ago, when I was a journalist with a leading daily in Bangalore, I was summoned to meet Sri Sri Ravishankar at his sprawling 30-acre ashram for a Sunday lead story - the interview in his air-conditioned kutir culminating with me accompanying the self-styled godman for his routine evening rounds, during which he meets people who usually throng to catch a fleeting glimpse of him - a man they consider a saint.
As Sri Sri greets his followers, some shed tears of joy, others enthusiastically hand over little chits of paper narrating their personal tragedies. Most of them were women, is what I still recall.
"Are you all happy?" he asks dramatically, waving quite like a Bollywood superstar from his sea-facing balcony, at which there erupts a thunderous, deafening applause. The problems that his female disciples express and need hand-holding on are mundane, almost making a mockery of why one even needs spiritual guidance today.
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Despite years of being victims of a silent sexual exploitation and oppression at the altar of Hinduism, why is it that women remain the biggest and most naïve consumers of organised religion in India? Why are they an easy bait for babas and maharajes, their so-called spiritual queries ranging from not getting a match, infertility, problems with in-laws, husbands touring too much, bad sex to no sex and further to almost the kind of silly questions one would expect to find in relationship columns of fashion and lifestyle magazines?
Ravishankar's message to the fairer sex who surround him is also rather simple: "Make the divine your Valentine."
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"I can put a toffee on your tongue, I can't make you taste it," says Sri Sri, adding, "Take life as it comes."
That honestly came with no intellectual or scriptural baggage, and felt more like a feel-good formula.
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Meanwhile, the Art of Living event being elaborately organised on the banks of river Yamuna in Delhi amid environmental concerns has bagged security equivalent to that during say, the Republic Day. The event, touted openly as an ecological disaster with a hefty Rs 5 crore fine slapped on Sri Sri's organisation by the National Green Tribunal (NGT), hogs all the prime time media attention with the latest ticker reading something like this: "We have not done anything wrong... we will go to jail but not pay a penny," claims 59-year old Sri Sri...
Which is why I ask how this spiritual rockstar, whose biggest support base happens to be women, is least bothered about the scale of sexual abuse in this country and spews eloquent on global culture, unity and compassion, when only this morning in Greater Noida - close to where he is organising his mega event - a 16-year-old girl, allegedly raped and set ablaze by a youth, succumbs to her injuries at the Safdurjung Hospital?
Doesn't Sri Sri read the papers, or feel the futility of a sponsored tamasha like this when there is a skyrocketing increase in crimes against women in Delhi and the National Capital Region (NCR)? With violence against women up almost 50 per cent last year itself, a report by the Delhi Police, in August 2015, stated how in the last two months seven rape cases, 16 instances of molestation and two murders had been registered.
Or are women in India treated the same way we treat our natural resources? We bathe and dump industrial and human waste in the rivers we worship as maiyya (mother) and take a holy dip in to purge our mortal sins, mercilessly cut forests and trees, dump sewage and solid waste on flood plains, scribble on our national monuments, defecate in public, caring a damn about the consequences!
Mother Nature and the woman on the street practically are the same - a silent, suffering, shameful victim. How is it that a woman is brutally gangraped in a Uttar Pradesh bus and her 14-day-old boy flung to death by two assailants, with the survivor's three-year-old daughter turning out to be the sole witness to the gruesome attack, and there is no word of condemnation even from our so-called seer?
The rapists allegedly forced alcohol down the 28-year-old woman's throat before the bloody gangrape, and pushed her into an inebriated condition for over three hours after the attack in Sheeshgarh village on Monday night. Why can't our religious and political leaders spend their resources to ensure women are safe and not objects of lust and aggression in this country?
If Sri Sri Ravishankar can instead protest these gruesome attacks, even contemplate cancelling his fancy event as a mark of personal shame, negotiate on sexual equality instead of talking world peace and smiling like a loving sakha, and attempt to draw the kind attention of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his army of devout ministers who are all slated to attend the star-studded event on Friday to what's grossly wrong here? Doesn't his conscience scream at him saying that universal love and world peace mean absolutely nothing in a culture that brutally butchers its own gender dynamics.
"The role of women in the development of society is of utmost importance. In fact, it is the only thing that determines whether a society is strong and harmonious, or otherwise. Women are the backbone of society," says Guruji, argues a friend, and a devout disciple who has been incessantly plugging his event on my timeline, and posting selfies at the Noida event, accompanied by her Guru sisters, as she refers to them.
When I tell her the above paragraph sounds like a perfect PR spiel, she probably copy-pastes from one of Sri Sri's innumerable press releases from Google, "Sri Sri's unique Women's Empowerment Programme gives vocational training, micro-finance venture incentives, self-development workshops, and self-help groups for disadvantaged women worldwide. The programme was launched in 1985 in Bangalore, as VISTA India (Value Integrated Services to All). Over 2,000 women from 30 different villages got trained through this programme. Inspired by the project's success, the programme was replicated in other parts of India, and other countries including Sri Lanka, South Africa, and Iraq."
The faith of women and our collective fate as a crucified gender binary is almost ironical - the way we almost excuse our religious leaders from having an active part to play in society, the way we prostrate ourselves in their divine presence, pray, fast and chant, and yet we don't see them as fence-sitters when it comes to sexual violence.
How does Sri Sri's greatness rest in the lives of women he has supposedly transformed - with a special emphasis on underprivileged women - when he has not ever publicly disowned sexual crimes that haunt us all? Or are our religious honchos no different than most political bigwigs - misleadingly and mystically misogynistic, with zero show of solidarity towards their biggest vote banks, in times such as this?