The Rajasthan High Court today deferred till September 18 the hearing on the bail petition of self-styled
godman Asaram Bapu, who is in jail for allegedly sexually assaulting a teenage girl.
The high court, which started the hearing of the case today, also directed the prosecution to produce the case diary at the next hearing.
In a jam-packed court room, senior advocate Ram Jethmalani, representing Asaram, argued that the first information report or FIR, the age of the girl as well as the entire case was fabricated.
Mr Jethmalani also mentioned that the girl was suffering from a chronic disease "which draws a woman to a man", and said this was subject to police investigation.
After the completion of arguments by the defence, Justice Nirmal Jeet Kaur deferred the proceedings till September 18 and directed the prosecution to put up the case diary in the court on the next date.
Pradhyumn Singh, one of the prosecution counsel, said that since the defence had completed its arguments today, the prosecution would carry out its arguments on the next hearing.
He said that there were two case diaries, one each of the investigations at Asaram's ashrams in Chhindwara and Ahmedabad, and that both would be produced before the court as per its directives.
Meanwhile, the spiritual guru and his aide Shiva appeared before the District and Sessions' Court today, which extended their judicial custody till September 30.
During their appearance, Asaram personally requested the judge to accept his request of allowing his personal doctor to treat his "chronic neurological disease", which he refers to as "trinadi shool".
When asked about the disease, he told the judge that it is a disorder which deprives him of a sound sleep.
Judge Manoj Kumar Vyas, however, refused to consider the plea in the absence of the defence counsel.
A fresh case of sexual assault has been registered against spiritual leader Asaram Bapu, who is in jail on similar charges. The complaint lodged by two sisters in Surat also names Asaram's son Narayan Sai.
The elder of the two sisters has alleged in her complaint that she was raped by Asaram at his Ahmedabad ashram; the younger sister has accused Narayan Sai of raping her in Surat. They say they are Asaram's followers and the incidents took place between 2002 and 2004.
The complaint against Narayan Sai has been registered at Jhangirpura police station in Surat, while the one against his father Asaram has been transferred to Ahmedabad as the alleged incident happened there, Surat Police Commissioner Rakesh Asthana said.
The police will question Narayan Sai in connection with the complaint shortly, he said.
Asaram, 75, was arrested in August on charges of sexually assaulting a schoolgirl and has been in prison in Jodhpur in Rajasthan since then. Shilpi, one of his key aides and the warden of Asaram's 'ashram' in Chhindwara district of Madhya Pradesh where the alleged sexual assault took place, too has been arrested and sent to judicial custody.
In court, investigators alleged that the spiritual leader has paedophilia.
But Asaram's famous lawyer, Ram Jethmalani, alleged that the teen complainant is not under-age or younger than 18, and that she made up the charges because she likes to spend time online and watch movies and was restricted in both activities at the boarding school where she was enrolled at one of Asaram Bapu's ashrams in Madhya Pradesh.
In August, she travelled with her parents to meet him at his retreat in Jodhpur. She has told the police that she then spent an hour with him in a room, while her parents waited outside. He allegedly promised her family that he would exorcise her of evil spirits.
On August 31, a police posse from Jodhpur arrested Asaram Bapu on charges of raping the 16-year-old daughter of a Shahjahanpur (Uttar Pradesh) couple who had been his devotees for years. He now awaits his fate in a cell at the Central Jail at Jodhpur. Allegations of earlier sexual misdemeanours, macabre tantric rituals, murder, intimidation and land grabbing have also resurfaced, tightening the noose around India's most controversial godman.
Asaram's followers seem just as driven as al Qaeda's intent-on-suicide jihadists, equally unquestioning, even prepared to die for the man they see as their saviour. "I am not afraid of going to jail or dying for Bapu," says Yogesh, 32. The lean sadhak, who was barely 18 and wanted to join the Indian Army but instead enlisted with "Bapuji ki fauj (Bapu's army)", is convinced Asaram is his only salvation. "Sitaaron se aage bhi kuchh hai (There is something more beyond the stars)," he says, evidently unbelieving of the rape charge that landed his 'god' in jail.
Yogesh is among seven of Asaram's closest followers accused of a role in the July 2008 deaths of two 10-year-old cousins. Abhishek and Dipesh, students of the gurukul at the godman's central ashram in Motera village outside Ahmedabad, were sons of two poor stone masons, Shantibhai and Praful Vaghela. A report submitted by the D.K. Trivedi Commission, notified by the Narendra Modi government in August 2008 to probe allegations that the boys were killed in tantric rituals, is being withheld.
His capacity to draw large gatherings at satsangs and his constantly swelling flock had, in time, politicians of all hues falling over each other to associate with Asaram. "He's as clever as they come for a man who has hardly had any formal schooling," says Amrut Prajapati, 54, who served as Asaram's personal vaid (ayurvedic physician) for 16 years. He says Asaram "can summon 50,000 people by simply snapping his fingers".
Ahead of the Assembly elections that first delivered him to the Gujarat chief minister's office in October 2001, Narendra Modi kick-started his poll campaign by sharing Asaram's stage and crowd. In the years that followed, the godman's entourage of politicians became a veritable galaxy including men and women like former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani, Uma Bharti, Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh, former president K.R. Narayanan, Union ministers Kamal Nath and Kapil Sibal, H.D. Deve Gowda and Raghuvansh Prasad Singh. George Fernandes and Farooq Abdullah also took their turn to pay obeisance.
Even after Modi curtailed his association following public outrage over the killing of the Vaghela cousins in July 2008, many of his party colleagues continued to cultivate Asaram. In December 2012, when the godman survived a helicopter crash in Godhra, bjp President Rajnath Singh promptly attributed the 'miracle' to the godman's "divine powers".
D.G. Vanzara, the suspended Gujarat Police deputy inspector general (DIG) currently in jail facing trial for four allegedly fake encounters, is widely believed to have helped Asaram expand his influence amid politicians and bureaucrats. "Vanzara was invariably at the Motera ashram during Guru Purnima, always escorting someone big," says a senior Ahmedabad journalist, adding that the godman milked his proximity to the powerful police officer to pre-empt police action against his own people in the most brazen instances of land grabbing. Whispers in Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad following Asaram's recent arrest allege "the godman and the cop were in cahoots".
Shantibhai and Praful Vaghela are convinced that Asaram and his men continued to influence the police long after the DIG was jailed in 2007 and prevented criminal action even after their sons' gouged-out corpses were recovered from the Sabarmati riverbed only a few hundred metres from the Motera ashram.
For a man who aspired to play god, Asaram seems given to base pursuits and creature comforts that most ordinary mortals would be embarrassed about. Prajapati, who gained access to the godman's innermost sanctums after he helped him recover from a severe bout of malaria in 1999, describes Asaram's 'shanti kutir' (peace hut) or 'dhyan ki kutiya' (meditation hut) from the first time he was summoned to attend to the ailing godman. "Asaram sprawled across an oversized bed, completely out of his wits," he recalls. But more than his patient, he remembers the opulence of his quarters "with uninterrupted air conditioning, an ultra-luxurious attached bathroom and even a dehumidifier" that kept air moisture levels bearable during the soggiest monsoons. Other than this, says the ayurvedic doctor, Asaram's rooms at most of his ashrams seemed almost spartan: Bare, cream coloured walls without picture frames, "not even his own portraits, the kind splashed across the rest of the ashram".
D.G. Vanzara, the suspended Gujarat Police deputy inspector general (DIG) currently in jail facing trial for four allegedly fake encounters, is widely believed to have helped Asaram expand his influence amid politicians and bureaucrats. "Vanzara was invariably at the Motera ashram during Guru Purnima, always escorting someone big," says a senior Ahmedabad journalist, adding that the godman milked his proximity to the powerful police officer to pre-empt police action against his own people in the most brazen instances of land grabbing. Whispers in Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad following Asaram's recent arrest allege "the godman and the cop were in cahoots".
Shantibhai and Praful Vaghela are convinced that Asaram and his men continued to influence the police long after the DIG was jailed in 2007 and prevented criminal action even after their sons' gouged-out corpses were recovered from the Sabarmati riverbed only a few hundred metres from the Motera ashram.
For a man who aspired to play god, Asaram seems given to base pursuits and creature comforts that most ordinary mortals would be embarrassed about. Prajapati, who gained access to the godman's innermost sanctums after he helped him recover from a severe bout of malaria in 1999, describes Asaram's 'shanti kutir' (peace hut) or 'dhyan ki kutiya' (meditation hut) from the first time he was summoned to attend to the ailing godman. "Asaram sprawled across an oversized bed, completely out of his wits," he recalls. But more than his patient, he remembers the opulence of his quarters "with uninterrupted air conditioning, an ultra-luxurious attached bathroom and even a dehumidifier" that kept air moisture levels bearable during the soggiest monsoons. Other than this, says the ayurvedic doctor, Asaram's rooms at most of his ashrams seemed almost spartan: Bare, cream coloured walls without picture frames, "not even his own portraits, the kind splashed across the rest of the ashram".
When he first began treatment in 1999, Prajapati says Asaram's essential afflictions included high cholesterol levels, an overactive thyroid gland and obesity. "Rakshas jaisa chehra tha (He had the face of a demon)," says the man who once worshipped Asaram as a god. On hindsight, he sees a "debauched person who could not do without three-hour massages and long baths in rose-scented water with saffron-infused soaps".
But what eventually drove men like Prajapati, Raju Chandak (a former ashram manager), his own son-in-law Hemant Bulani, former man Friday Dinesh Bhagchandani and scores of other once-committed followers away from Asaram's mesmerising gridlock was their discovery of his irrepressible weakness for young women. Something that has now landed the godman in jail on charges of forcing himself on a minor girl.
Fifty-two-year-old Sudha Patel, who became a part of Asaram's flock at the Motera ashram in 1986, says she was forced to flee a decade later. "It was no longer an ashram, a place where one could seek god," she says recounting sordid details of how two young women codenamed 'dehl' (peahen in Gujarati) and 'bungalow' would act as spotters, constantly scoping out congregations for young women. Their cue, she says, was when the godman threw a fruit or piece of candy, at a girl he fancied amid his devotees.
"It was a simple and practiced routine," says Sudha. "The spotters and older sadhikas convinced the girl's parents that their daughter had been blessed. They cajoled them to take her to Asaram's kutir where he would perform anusthaan (special puja) especially for her."
Sudha and Prajapati, however, admit that there was seldom any coercion. "Most girls and families believed they were blessed. After all, their 'god' had chosen them. He was 'Krishna' and they would be his 'gopis'," says Prajapati, recalling instances where he was witness to arguments over who would go into Asaram's kutir on a particular day.
Sudha, who earns a meagre living selling ayurvedic medicines in Ahmedabad, says she is among a handful of women of the Motera ashram who survived despite spurning the godman. She claims Asaram had openly offered to reward anyone who could bring her around. "He would often announce during the satsangs-'jo Sudha ko sudhaar ke dikhawe, use ek lakh rupaye inaam doonga' (whoever reforms Sudha will be rewarded with Rs.1 lakh)," she says.
Despondency is plainly evident at the Motera ashram. Attendance has visibly thinned. "Wahan par koi nahi hai. Bapu ko to police pakad kar le gayi (There is nobody there the police have taken Asaram away)," an autorickshaw driver at the end of the road leading to the ashram informs you. He is trying to be helpful but gives you the distinct impression that he knew this would happen.
Behind zealously guarded perimeter walls is a profusely green oasis of peepul, neem and banyan trees growing around the ashram buildings with walls peppered with larger-than-life images of Asaram and excerpts from his 'teachings'. Not far below the spot where followers say Asaram first sat down to meditate 42 years ago, the Sabarmati quietly flows towards another not-so-controversial and humble-in-comparison ashram-the Mahatama Gandhi memorial.
The decidedly sparse sprinkling of followers still battling to keep their faith belies his claim. Two youngsters, dressed in the signature white kafnis (short kurtas) and dhotis chant monotonously. Close by, a couple sits before a smoking havan with folded hands. They are all praying for only one thing-Asaram's release from jail.
"Moorkh (Fools)," Prajapati says of people who continue to blindly pursue their faith in Asaram despite repeated exposure of his true face.
On January 7, amid the raging storm over the brutal gang rape of a physiotherapy student in south Delhi on December 16, Asaram declared the victim was as guilty as her attackers. "The girl should have called the culprits her brothers and begged them to stop this could have saved her life," he stated, adding to the outrage.
Would Asaram have relented if the 16-year-old he is accused of raping had addressed him as brother? "Not a chance," says Prajapati, "he would not have backed off even if she had called him 'father'. He insists he is god and everything he does is an 'act of god'."
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