When ‘ sarkari’ Gurus, Babas and godmen remind you of Tsarist Russia and Rasputin

I do not want any wisdom on patriotism or nationalism from the saffron-clad– or even white-clad - self-proclaimed godmen of this country.

Of late, two of the three prominent godmen in this regime, Ramdev and Jaggi Vasudev, have been shedding  a lot of wisdom on political  issues and are being  exposed  for the charlatans that they really are.

Jaggi Vasudev, who goes by the self-proclaimed title of Sadguru, recently put out a tweet wherein he exhorted the people to eat so many sweets that they themselves become so sweet that sweets automatically reject them. I wanted to tell Vasudev that just because he could speak in English, he did not have the right to confuse others who didn’t.

If anyone ever took his sweets-tweet seriously, they would regret it for the rest of their lives. For it is not a nice thing, certainly no sweet thing, to be wracked with diabetes. It leads to all sorts of other ailments including heart and kidney malfunctions, blindness and blood pressure – I don’t think anyone with these ailments would find life sweet or people dealing with them find them sweet.

I could not even ask Vasudev who he was trying to fool, because by and large no one was fooled. However, the complete intellectual dishonesty of that tweet was astounding. I also wanted to say to him, just because you speak English with a very hoity-toity accent, doesn’t mean you become a fount of wisdom or can expect to defraud people into believing that you are one.

But now Vasudev irritates me and possibly others too even more with his pontifications on the Citizenship Amendment Act and the protests against its implementation. I was both amused and saddened at the government's intellectual bankruptcy when Narendra Modi found none better than Vasudev to promote the CAA.

But while Vasudev was exhorting people to read the Act in toto before protesting, there was more  intellectual - and moral – bankruptcy when he  himself admitted that he had not  read the Act beyond what had appeared in the newspapers. And yet he could find himself capable of scolding young students for not reading the Act.

Would you ever allow a teacher of arts tell you how to build a rocket? Well, that is how Vasudev sounded – and I think he knew it too. But like most people under pressure from this government, he has much to hide and perhaps had no choice but to mouth some platitudes on behalf of the government – including holding protesters responsible for burning buses and no word on saffron bigots lynching Muslims.

If he were a true Guru, all human beings with the same red blood flowing in them would be equal to him and he would be asserting his moral authority to have the government fall in line and not the other way round. I have enough wisdom to make my own sense of the government and do not need a half-baked Guru grabbing tribal land and charging farmers to save water (where did the money go, I wonder when there was no trust set up for that activity) to tell me any better.

But if Vasudev is the hoity-toity English-spouting Sarkari Guru, Ramdev, calling himself a Baba, is their more rustic Rasputin with a larger connect to the masses through his yoga and his herbal and ayurvedic consumable product line.

Like Vasudev, he too has grabbed land, with or without government complicity – like in the Aravalli or the elephant corridor in Assam - which should not really belong to him.

He was doing pretty well until he decided to escape from the Ramlila Grounds in New Delhi in women's clothing and gratuitously equated that with Chhatrapati Shivaji’s daring escape from Aurangzeb’s prison in Agra. Since then, instead of sticking to his ‘kapalbhati’ and ‘anulom-vilom’ which, admittedly, he had a huge hand in popularising,  he has claimed to be the original formulator of the Demonetisation  theory as a means to curb black money.

If true, we all by now know what a disastrous policy demonetisation was and all the more reason for the government to put a twenty feet wide distance between themselves and Ramdev. But failure and exposure just does not stop Ramdev.  After suggesting that he would behead anyone who does not chant Bharat Mata ki jai (what about those who prefer Jai Hind instead, I wonder, like Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and Indira Gandhi) Ramdev now is calling on the government to take action against all those clamouring for freedom from the government’s oppression.

The call for Azaadi first went out at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2016 but far from being a call for rebellion, it has now been established as a cry against fascism and police oppression in this country. The chant is now a modern-day mantra of freedom and I am sure, like Vasudev, Ramdev has neither heard it in full nor understood its context.

I am willing to follow him in toto in his breathing exercises and to even try out his toothpastes and shampoos. But why should I have to take lessons from him in how I see my country and its government, I fail to understand.

Thankfully, the third Sarkari Rasputin is out of sorts ever since the Supreme Court ruled on the Ayodhya dispute and the Ram temple ceased to be an issue. Ravi Shankar- who would have us repeat his appellation not once but twice- Sri Sri  – should have stuck to his Sudarshan Kriyas instead of venturing to a domain where bigger charlatans than him existed and thus were  bound to overshadow him.

A politician friend of mine who was well versed in philosophy and the Vedas was once at the same religious conference as him in Spain in the 1990s. He came back very disappointed with his interaction with the godman. “I only have surface knowledge of our Shastras and was very afraid to be placed on par with all those world religious leaders," he told me. “But when I met Sri Sri, I realised he knew even less and I felt secure that I would be making less of a fool of myself at the conference," he said.

Sadly, these Rasputins don’t even have the knowledge of their own domains. Why should they become our political Gurus as well?