The assembly of about a lakh people in Panchkula, mostly young men and women, in support of Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim doesn’t present the same visual and aural delight as the picture of a hairy man in satin shorts and a colourful, shiny singlet belting out “Love sarger” (charger) in a stadium-full of devotees screaming to their guru’s hip gyrations and chest heaving.
The two situations, however, have a frightening commonality: That hundreds of thousands of followers, drunk over their cultic head, are prepared to blindly follow him… to nowhere.
India’s Long Tryst With Psycho-Religious Cults
By most accounts, Gurmeet Ram Rahim leads his flock like most cultic heads – and they abound – in modern, post-independence India. Sermons, extravagant musical soirees and a sense of master-and-minion relationship inculcated in followers are some of the common characteristics of psycho-religious cults.
But such systems of worship, with their distinctive trappings of rites and ceremonies, which sometimes border on the insane, involve veneration of the cult head by their body of admirers who are prepared to lose – irrational as it may sound and seem – everything in the event of a confrontation with the law.
The massive gathering in Panchkula, marked by scenes of distraught young men weeping and fainting at the prospect of their spiritual preceptor being thrown in jail for alleged rape, is like the terrifying prelude to the violence and the subsequent gun battle between the police and followers of Jai Gurudev in Mathura in 2015. The history of India’s cultic movements and their leaders, irrespective of whether they were saintly or just charlatans preying on the insecurities and anxieties of their followers, is replete with instances of the devotees challenging the law.
How Babas Feed on People’s Distress
I am reminded of the charged atmosphere in June 1993 among the devotees of Balak Brahmachari, the head of a cultic body called Sanatan Dal that originated in West Bengal’s Sukchar some 20-odd kms from Kolkata. Brahmachari had died a natural death, but his fanatical followers believed that he was simply in a meditative trance and would soon awaken. So, the followers, armed with menacing tridents, clung onto his decomposed body for 55 days before the tact and guile of a pathologist helped convince them that their babaji was after all a mortal man. The Sanatan Dal dissolved in no time.
Who are these followers? What strata of society do they belong to? And what impels them to fanatically follow their preceptors when science and rationality should command them to do exactly otherwise? Outwardly, cults might appear to be conglomerations of gullible men insanely following pied pipers, seeking psychological healing, alternative therapies and social support structures.
The cults with their savvy marketing leaders proclaim easier and more accessible routes to spiritual “insight, understanding, satisfying relationships with others and peace with self and the world”.
This is achieved by exploiting the weaknesses of existing institutions of Hinduism, family, modern psychiatry and the economy. In more recent times, India’s babajis across several states successfully tapped into the dissatisfaction caused by the impact of the economic paradigm that has created stress and anxiety.
Creating a Sense of ‘Alternate Reality’
They do not intend to help one cope with reality, but, rather, offer a new sense of reality and self-esteem. The devotees often demonstrate symptoms of distress which they believe would be significantly ameliorated through membership and participation in cults.
It is in these conditions that people on the margins, as in the case of the followers of Mathura’s Jai Gurudev or Sirsa’s Dera Sacha Sauda, enter such “separate” or “alternate” reality which they believe confer them meaning insofar as their lives and experiences are concerned.
The “new age” cult followers, faced with the pressures of change in an increasingly transforming India, comprise men and women who are, more often than not, at socially and economically disadvantaged situations as compared to those who are part of and follow mainstream religious orders.
In fact, their strong, and sometimes uncompromising, adherence to cultic orders and the sundry gurus and babas stems from an “existential vacuum” and their desire to achieve social respectability.
The vulnerable condition – primarily social and economic – makes it relatively easy for cult leaders to subject the devotees to intensive conditioning (or brainwashing), which in turn is aimed at compromising the followers’ psychological integrity and “indoctrinate them in a world view in which the ends (salvation, social recognition, personal health) justify the means (deceptive recruitment, fraudulent fund-raising and weird psycho-religious practices)”.
Cognitive conditioning carries the risk of reducing the followers’ capacity to distinguish between the truly pious and the charlatan, leaving them obedient to authority by abandoning their individuality and seeming rationality.
In Gurmeet Ram Rahim’s case – as in the case of several of India’s self-proclaimed, television-propelled godmen and ‘psychotherapists’ – their large human followings make them attractive targets for political parties who seek to maximise their vote base. This, in turn, accords them legitimacy and acceptability within the larger social ferment in an India on the cusp of irregular and haphazard change.
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