Haima Deshpande: The Dark Side of Asaram Bapu // Jyoti Malhotra - Why is Uma Bharti defending Asaram Bapu?
Haima Deshpande: The Dark Side of Asaram Bapu
Jyoti Malhotra - Why is Uma Bharti defending Asaram Bapu?
Less than 35 kilometres from the centre of Ahmedabad lies the dusty town of Motera, now made famous by one of India’s best known spiritual gurus, self-styled philosopher and friend to the rich and the powerful. Nearly 42 years ago, a developing friendship with the powers that be in Gujarat earned Asaram Harpalani, the son a coal and wood seller, 10 acres of fertile agricultural land. The land did not come to him all at once, it accumulated over the years as friendships strengthened. Harpalani, who was born in 1941 in Berami village of Pakistan’s Sindh province, set up a small ashram on the land, the first of over 400 ashrams that exist today across the world. Soon enough, this self-styled religious preacher dropped his tongue twister of a surname and began calling himself Asaram Bapu.
His controversial intervention in the Delhi rape case—when he said “galati ek taraf se nahin hoti hai,” suggesting the victim of the sexual assault was equally responsible for the crime—has recently brought unwanted national attention to the man, but in Gujarat, Asaram and his Motera ashram have been in the eye of a storm since July 2008. The controversy involves the deaths of two ten-year-old cousins, Abhishek and Dipesh Vaghela, at the ashram’s Bal Kendra, on 3 July, a month after they were admitted there as students. On 23 January this year, seven disciples of Asaram accused in the Vaghela case were summoned by an Ahmedabad court.
In the aftermath of the disappearance of the Vaghela brothers from the heavily guarded Bal Kendra, the ashram administration, including Asaram and Darshan Sai, had initially played down the seriousness of the incident. The parents of the children were told that they had run away home, a fact vociferously contested by them. “My brother Shantibhai and I enrolled our children at the Motera ashram for education,” said Praful Vaghela, father of Dipesh.
“We paid Rs 15,000 each but were not given pucca receipts. It was just a handwritten receipt. The children were given yellow T-shirts and white pajamas as uniform in the ashram. In that month, we visited them at least six to eight times. On 28 June, when we visited the ashram, their hair was tonsured and both had sandalwood tikas on their foreheads. I was uncomfortable with this,” said Vaghela. According to him, the children told him that the tonsuring was done in the presence of Asaram. On the afternoon of 3 July, Shantibhai met the children at the ashram. At 9 pm the same day, Praful Vaghela received a call from the ashram administration inquiring if the children had come home. The Vaghelas went to the ashram and looked for the children. At the end of their futile search, Pankaj Saksena, the administrator of the gurukul told them to go around a peepal tree 11 times and ask for the children.
They did so but “nothing happened”. The family, Vaghela claimed, wanted to file a police complaint, but the Ashram administration did not allow them to do so. The family waited out the night and proceeded to the Chandkeda police station the next morning. Two office bearers of the ashram—Vikas Khemcha and Ajay Shah—were already there at the police station. “They went in and spoke to the police. Then they came out and told us to go inside. The police got angry with us when we demanded that a complaint be filed. They did not let us file one,” says the distressed father... read more:
How dare Uma Bharti defend Asaram Bapu’s alleged rape of a 15-year-old girl child. It’s bad enough that our political parties are contesting the Supreme Court judgement seeking to cleanse politics from criminality and thuggery as well as wanting to amend the RTI act barring political parties from its purview. India needs a brave leader to challenge the herd instinct that promotes both these regressive legislations. Even if the Supreme Court verdict on criminality and politics needs to be amended in some ways because the reality is far tougher and definitely much more grim, there is no denying the nexus between the two.
But now we seem to have hit a new low : Uma Bharti, a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) who has risen from the ranks to occupy one of the highest political offices in the country, that of chief minister, is now defending a so-called godman for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl child. According to the BJP leader, this is a cooked-up case by Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi acolytes to defame the godman.
Godman? A 15-year-old child has had the incredible courage to tell her parents that this Asaram Bapu sexually assaulted her in his ashram in Jodhpur, and this is what she gets in return. How dare Uma Bharti defend this man, especially when the investigation has still not been concluded? Why is it that the BJP’s several women leaders at the top – like Sushma Swaraj, Nirmala Sitharaman, Smriti Irani, Meenakshi Lekhi, etc – have not reprimanded Uma Bharti publicly so far?
For a party that has implemented 33 per cent reservation for women and claims to support the Women’s Reservation Bill in Parliament – because it hopes to bring many more women into public life -- this shocking silence is only a reflection of its lack of moral courage in speaking up against one of their own. The truth is that if Uma Bharti is not criticised today by all Indians, and especially those belonging to the BJP family, then this silence will feed into a patriarchal mindset that believes that men can commit the gravest misconduct against women and get away with it.
This is why the shocking gang-rape of a 22-year-old journalist has taken place in Mumbai – because its perpetrators believed that they would get away with this heinous act. This is why there has been no overhauling of the nation’s laws that militate against equality for women. This is why Nirbhaya may have just died in vain. What is the matter with our women leaders in politics? Sonia Gandhi, Mayawati, Mamata Banerjee, Sushma Swaraj, Jayalalithaa...if these women want, they can together change the course of India’s political history.
If these women want, they can come together and put the fear of god into all the so-called godmen as well as others who dare take advantage of India’s women. By speaking up in favour of this 15-year-old girl child, and other women who are everyday victims in our country, simply because they are women, our women leaders will do us proud.
We hope they won’t let us down.
