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“I’d be naive if I weren’t worried about it,” Priyanka Pathak Narain hesitates and hedges before taking a stab at the question I ask her – is she worried about a possible fallout of the potentially explosive book she has authored?
Narain has recently penned a biography on the self-styled godman and now business tycoon Baba Ramdev – beloved of innumerable Indians across the world. Her book Godman to Tycoon: The Untold Story of Baba Ramdev has already created a buzz on social media – and it isn’t hard to fathom why. Narain’s book traces the entire orbit of Ramdev’s life – from farm boy to yoga aspirant to television enthusiast to business mogul – something that hasn’t been too difficult for Narain, considering she was a religion reporter for several years.
The book emerged quite organically, therefore.
It couldn’t have been easy, surely? Particularly since the story delves into certain dark realms – such as the mysterious disappearance of his guru Shankar Dev (and Ramdev’s strange press conference, after), a couple of murky, unsolved deaths of people connected closely with his ashram, a purported bullying of the previous chairman of Aastha India (which Ramdev eventually took over), et al. Narain is pragmatic as she tells me about simply having “wanted to report it all”.
She is quick to add, however, that it was “never her intention to judge”. “What did you think when you read it?” she asks me with urgency.
But does she think he ‘got away’ with a lot over the years? – I persist in asking. Much of Narain’s text, as I read it, strike me as a series of relationships and alliances that Baba Ramdev built upon for his immediate needs – before discarding them by the wayside. In Narain’s own words, at the end of chapter 22 – “…Ramdev is happy to take other people’s help – but only on his own terms”.
“I don’t know about getting away, but he certainly wears an armour.” Narain answers me, qualifying the statement by reminding me that the godman “has been through a wringer – one calamity after another since his childhood”. She has obviously spent enough time with him to get a read on him, but Narain refutes that with a thoughtful pause.
The only time Ramdev let his guard down – according to the journalist-turned-author? “After the Ramlila fiasco,” she tells me confidently.
Narain details how, post the disguise debacle, Ramdev “had instantly gone from national anti-corruption warrior to laughing stock”.
She tells me how, in the few days that followed, “he was truly vulnerable. You could understand what he was going through.”
Narain does talk about how it wasn’t hard to get anyone talking about Ramdev really – particularly the people she mentions as having had some sort of a fallout with him.
Kirit Mehta, for instance, talks about the time Ramdev sought to meet with him in 2009. It was the meeting, according to Mehta, where Ramdev and his allies, urged him to resign from his post as Chairman and MD of Aastha India. According to Mehta:
Why, in spite of (and perhaps because of) the controversies, does she believe people adore him to such lengths?
But then, what happens when he makes outrageous claims such as his yogic means and medicines managing to “cure HIV and homosexuality”? “It’s a mystifying question (why so many believe it),” Narain admits. “Has he ‘cured’ anyone of homosexuality through his means? Not as far as I know.”
Also Read: Curing Homosexuality, Baba Ramdev Way: The Quint’s Sting Operation
Narain is almost anxious on the score that people see the book for what she meant it to be – an objective relaying of his life. “I do hope the people reading it can see that I’ve kept it balanced, that I’ve simply examined his life without passing judgement. There is no personal agenda.”
(Excerpted with permission from Godman to Tycoon: The Untold Story of Baba Ramdev by Priyanka Pathak-Narain, available in bookstores and on www.juggernaut.in)
(The article is being republished from The Quint’s archives in view of the restraint order on the publication of a book on Baba Ramdev’s life. It was first published on 31 July 2017.)
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