Bad time for Babas: Competitive media leave no place for them to hide in Odisha

It is a particularly inauspicious time for Babas in Odisha. Used to enjoying the unquestioning following of gullible devotees on the one hand and the unstinted support of the administration on the other for decades, they are being hounded like never before. It all began with an expose on newly launched local TV news channel about the colourful life of Sarathi Baba, the man with lakhs of followers who had built an empire of sorts in the best traditions of Indian babadom, in the first week of August. It showed the 48-year old Baba, never seen in public in anything but spotless white dhoti and banyan, in jeans and T-shirt sporting Rayban glasses in the lobby of a posh Hyderabad hotel. Quoting ‘sources’ in the hotel, the channel also claimed that the Baba had checked into the hotel in the company of a young girl and ordered chicken dishes and alcohol during his three-day stay. [caption id=“attachment_2422944” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. Reuters[/caption] What the channel showed by way of ‘proof’ did not amount to much. The girl, for instance, was never shown with him. Nor was any concrete evidence provided to buttress the claim that the holy man had indeed ordered those items. There was more innuendo than proof in the initial reports aired on the channel. But all hell broke loose once the channel started airing what it later boasted was ‘100 hours of non-stop coverage’ of the Baba’s shenanigans. Outraged by the ‘revelations’, people broke into spontaneous demonstrations at various places in the state, including Kendrapara where the Baba held sway for close to two decades. The Baba initially tied to brazen it out saying he had never gone to Hyderabad. But his blatant lie was nailed in less than 24 hours when the media produced the details of his Hyderabad sojourn, including photocopies of his tickets booked on an Indigo flight and the identity proofs presented at the time of checking into the Golconda Hotel in the Banzara Hills area of Hyderabad. The Baba’s fate was sealed when the girl herself appeared on another television channel to confirm that she had indeed accompanied Sarathi Baba to Hyderabad. As the protesters in Kendarapra grew restive, the police, which had initially tried to suppress it with brute force, had no option but to arrest the Baba and whisk him away to Cuttack for interrogation in the wee hours of August 7. With their kingdom now in ruins, the Baba and his alleged son Satyam, who he claims to have created out of bibhuti, are now cooling their heels in the Choudwar circle jail. Given the inherently competitive nature of TV journalism, it was perhaps inevitable that rival channels trained the spotlight on other Babas who, like Sarathi Baba, have built their empires on encroached government land (while the administration looked the other way), accumulated immense wealth by cashing in on the gullibility of the devotees and indulged in sexual exploitation of the most revolting kind. “I find it hard to believe the stories that are coming out in the media on a daily basis. How could so many women believe these tricksters posing as reincarnation of Lord Krishna and surrender themselves to their lust in this age and time?” asks Smrutirekha Pani, a Bhubaneswar homemaker, incredulity written large over her face. But she readily admits that she cannot dismiss the stories as lies, coming as they do from the victims themselves. In the days since the fall of Sarathi Baba, many Babas have bitten the dust – Abhiram Baba and Shankarananda Baba in Bhubaneswar, Sura Baba at Jhiinti on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar, Kalki Baba alias Bana Baba near Konark, ‘Mentho Plus’ Baba in Jajpur (so named apparently because he cured all ailments with a dose of Mentho Plus!) being some of the more prominent ones. There is a Mata too – Premamayi Krishna Mata of Cuttack – under the scanner of the administration and the police, providing a semblance of gender parity as it were! Sura Baba alias Surendra Mishra, who set up the famous Trahi Achyuta ashram in Jhiiniti, and his two sons are now in Crime Branch remand while Kalki Baba quietly vacated the 26 acres of forest land he had encroached and built his ashram on without a murmur an hour before the deadline given by the Puri district administration was to expire on Friday midnight. More arrests are on the cards. With the media spotlight refusing to budge from the Babas, Bhubaneswar police has been forced to dust off an FIR filed by a Danish national Allen Franklin Nielsen in 2010 and then again in May this year accusing Swami Shankarananda Giri, the founder of the Kriya Yoga ashram in the city, of duping him of Rs 2 crore. With unsavoury revelations about Babas coming to the fore with each passing day, victims of their greed and lust are now emboldened to lodge fresh complaints against them. Cases of cheating, murder, human sacrifice and sexual exploitation are now being registered in a frenzy. The state government has written to collectors of all 30 districts asking them to probe the affairs of all mutts and ashrams in their areas and to see if illegal or immoral activities are going on there. Instructions have also gone out to the police administration to move in wherever there is any suspicion of wrongdoing. But most people are not convinced that that the government would take things to their logical conclusion. “The sense of urgency that the government is now showing will last only as long as the media spotlight is on the Babas. The moment the media moves on to other things, the government would go back to its old ways. After all, these Babas could not have flourished for so long without the patronage of the politicians and the backing of the local administration, could they?” asks Chitta Ranjan Dash, a senior citizen in Bhubaneswar. There certainly is a point to ponder in what Dash says.