Rise and fall of beastly Baba Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh
In May this year, I was in a hotel in Lucknow having breakfast when suddenly there was a commotion, with security guards swarming the lobby and the staff in a tizzy.
The cause was the arrival of cult leader Baba Gurmeet Singh Ram Rahim Insaan, head of Dera Sacha Sauda. Though I am no fan of self-styled godmen, I had heard of this strange “guru”, and the ever-curious journalist in me agreed to meet him.
I found a weirdly dressed man with his smiling, adoring, adopted daughter Honeypreet in tow, sipping tea and speaking softly to me about the three goals of his dera: drug deaddiction, rehabilitation of prostitutes and blood donation.
We now know this was a benign front for murkier activities in his sprawling 700-acre enclave in Sirsa in Haryana. Since taking over the mantle of the 69-year-old dera under suspicious circumstances in 2002, the 50-year-old school dropout and former odd-jobs man from Ganganagar in Rajasthan had made his dera one of the richest and most influential religious sects in the state.
He was routinely feted with awards and donations from politicians of every stripe, and his support was considered critical in at least 27 of the 117 assembly constituencies in the state. As his power grew, with a purported following of some 70 million, clearly so did his ego, leading to his starring in films where he flew through the air, wrestled lions and belted out tuneless songs before an adoring audience.
He projected himself as “Love Charger”, “Messenger of God” and “Papaji” to his “premis” or devotees. He also, it turns out, presided over an empire where murder, rape and castration were common.
Our cover story uncovers this beastly baba’s rise as well as the mass rioting in Panchkula last week that left over 30 dead after Gurmeet Singh was convicted of raping two devotees, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. It also raises some thought-provoking questions.
Dera Sacha Sauda is one of 3,000 deras in Punjab of varying influence. They exist to fulfill a real need, of providing succour to those at the margins of society and of organised religion. Over 30 per cent of Punjab’s population is Dalit, a community that has long been ostracised by mainstream faiths.
The dera culture offers them the promise of respect and equality regardless of their birth. In addition, the great appeal for the downtrodden is a safe haven providing shelter, education, health services and employment in exchange for unquestioning loyalty to the leader. They fill a vacuum left by the state due to bad governance.
As is often the case in India, where there is religion and mass following, politics cannot be far behind. The irony is that the failure of politics leads to the creation of such deras and yet it is the politicians who use them as vote banks as devotees follow the instructions of the dera leader. This also ensures that the state turns a blind eye to activities that are often against the law.
We may have found him ludicrous, but to his followers he was nothing short of a messianic force who could do anything — sweep streets clean with the chief minister of Haryana as easily as accept a lifetime achievement award from the chief minister of Maharashtra; accept a gift of Rs 51 lakh from ministers in the Haryana government as easily as he could claim the privilege of being one of only 36 people to get Z-plus security from the state. Hardly any politician of note has lauded his conviction.
Deputy editor Asit Jolly, based in Chandigarh, who has written this issue’s cover story, has watched the emergence of Gurmeet Singh and understands the power dera leaders wield over their followers.
The dera is an offshoot of the Bhakti movement, its power amplified by the available technology and the psychological despair at the heart of modern life. Above all, the rise of such cults is a failure of the Indian state. If we had actually delivered on “sabka saath, sabka vikaas”, these venal babas would not exist.
(India Today Editor-in-Chief's note for cover story, Baba The Beast; September 11, 2017.)