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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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)
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