In this torrid summer of dimagi naxals and cockroaches, Gen Z and Generation Gutter, relevance is the only currency that matters. As a protest led by India’s young snowballed off Instagram and spilled out into our streets, taking with it a Union education minister and 12 years of the government’s overconfidence, everyone with a platform has had to arrive at a position on people under 25. Many prominent figures are rediscovering their voices, of whom the most recent is Ramdev.
The billionaire businessman and yoga guru is now positioning himself as a champion of Gen Z and an anti-establishment voice.
It all started with Ramdev’s Independence Day address, delivered from his campus in Haridwar.
“Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, Dalit, Adivasi, Vanvasi, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Jain, Buddhist have stood before one another with such enmity and opposition as if they are thirsty for each other’s blood. We have to break all these walls of hatred in the country,” he said.
His next target was paper leaks.
“Cheating is rampant in some places, while question papers are being leaked in others,” he said, in the presence of his business partner Acharya Balkrishna, managing director of Patanjali Ayurved. “In government job interviews, corruption runs as high as 99%… then how will the country run?”
Growing agitated with each word, Ramdev warned: “Hence, mend your ways; otherwise, agitation will escalate further… Kindly fix this, or else Ramdev will have to protest again.”
That “protest again” was a bit of a personal affront, even as it was a little self-aggrandising. Ramdev was referring to the India Against Corruption protests of 2011-12, which set a rather vibrant stage for the downfall of the UPA’s second term. In June 2011, he led a large protest at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan, but most of us associate it with him actually abandoning the scene when the police lathicharged protesters and lobbed tear gas shells. He was discovered a few hours later pretending to be an old woman dressed in a salwar kameez.
Still, the attack on Ramdev and his supporters had handed the opposition, particularly the BJP, the ammunition it needed. LK Advani compared it to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, while Narendra Modi, then Gujarat chief minister, labelled it “one of the worst days of Indian history”. That was also the year when the seeds of a deep and abiding friendship between the BJP and Ramdev were sown.
So his current threats to relaunch an agitation are a reminder that at the present government’s bonfire of the vanities, he’ll be the one holding the lit torch aloft.
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Ramdev-BJP friendship cancel?
As Ramdev genuflects before India’s youth — urging them to compare themselves to Krishna, not cockroaches — he’s also got into scraps with some BJP leaders.
A few days ago, Ramdev participated in a TV discussion and took exception to Mandi MP Kangana Ranaut’s remarks about young cockroaches. She had spent the last week of July finger-wagging at “Generation Gutter” protesters, calling them “crass”, “so ugly and corrupt”, not even fit to be housewives, and flaunting their freedom to do drugs. Ranaut later added a flawless clarification, arguing that “those who call themselves cockroaches, and we say that cockroaches emerge from gutters, what is wrong with that?”
Well, not on Ramdev’s watch. He said that using the word “gutter” for the country’s young people was a sign of a corrupted mind, and wondered what Ranaut’s own childhood and youth must have been like. Ranaut responded with “Baba ji don’t day dream about my jawani or bedroom,” and, in a final death-blow, “I never got scolded by the Supreme Court.”
Ranaut wasn’t alone. Soon after, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh — a former BJP MP, recently acquitted in the high-profile wrestlers’ sexual harassment case — asked who takes Ramdev seriously, and whether he had the capacity for an agitation at all.
It’s tempting to read these recent spats as an imminent “friendship cancel” between Ramdev and the BJP. After all, the two entities have been locked in a symbiotic dance for years.
Kaushik Deka writes in The Baba Ramdev Phenomenon (2017) that even as far back as 2009, Patanjali Ayurved had donated Rs 11 lakh to the BJP and had predicted its meteoric rise in 2014.
“It comes as no surprise, therefore, there has been a shower of perks and honour since the BJP came to power at the Centre in 2014 and in several other states afterwards,” Deka notes. “Apart from state governments offering him lands to set up factories, herbal parks, universities, schools and cowsheds, Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari even offered him an island in the Andamans to set up a yoga resort.”
Between 2014 and 2017 alone, Patanjali reportedly received roughly $46 million in discounts on land, with acquisitions in BJP-run states averaging 77 per cent below market rates. In November 2014, Ramdev received Z-category security, and about two years later, 35 CISF personnel were deployed at Patanjali’s Haridwar food park — it is one of only eight private facilities in the country to be given paramilitary cover.
According to Deka, “The Modi government has given a big push to the Patanjali products manufactured by Ramdev’s vast business establishment by ordering that these be stocked by the government-run Kendriya Bhandars.” In 2016, even the DRDO announced a tie-up with Patanjali Yogpeeth to market herbal supplements and food products.
This is just a small insight into Ramdev’s links with the BJP. However, when he takes an oppositional stance on the education system, he’s speaking as a stakeholder, not a rent-a-quote baba.
Ramdev’s swadeshi solutions
Ramdev has been in the education business for years. In 2019, he was named chairman of the Bharatiya Shiksha Board, which is built around “Indian traditional knowledge” and affiliates schools and sets exams for two lakh children. In March that year, education minister Prakash Javadekar oversaw the handover of the new board to Patanjali, despite objections from the Vedic board, hours before the Model Code of Conduct for the 2019 elections came into force.
The board, which started operations in 2022, is an extension of Ramdev’s chosen philosophy of offering swadeshi alternatives to “Western” imports such as modern medicine, FMCG goods, and even Maggi. He even took on Rooh Afza with a ‘sharbat jihad’ charge. He’s consistently pitched himself, and his products, as the alternative to a failing mainstream.
Paper leaks are excellent for this business. Every cancelled exam or arrest in a chain of failures makes the case for an efficient alternative sitting just outside the mainstream.
But for the cockroaches, there is little interest in alternatives — their goal is holding the existing system accountable. Through August, the CJP has sent teams of volunteers to assess government schools in different states on a checklist: drinking water and toilets, electricity and a usable classroom, a boundary wall and a midday meal. They’ve had mixed results: in Alwar, outsiders were barred from taking photographs, while in West Bengal, one of their team members and his father were attacked; the father died two days later.
What are the swadeshi alternatives to this simple checklist?
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The young aren’t buying it
Meanwhile, what Ramdev is up to is anybody’s guess. He might be freelancing for the other side. The aspirational middle class that buys Patanjali products are also the ones whose kids have had to repeat exams. Will they continue to buy his toothpaste and ghee if Ramdev keeps batting for the government? Or maybe he has read the political winds and is preparing to return to a time when he was everybody’s friend. Or maybe he’s working according to plan, acting as a pressure valve for an anger that has already cost one minister his job.
In a 2011 profile for Caravan magazine, Christophe Jaffrelot labelled Ramdev a “swami without a sampradaya” (system of spiritual knowledge). Jaffrelot classed him as part of a newer brand of saffron-clad sadhus, who were “political animals without spiritual qualms” and who communicated in a “one-way, simplified and simplistic style”. This leaves Ramdev a free agent, with a significant competitive advantage — he can associate with whoever he wishes with no dent to his personality.
Except the young.
When Ramdev advised the cockroaches on rebranding themselves, CJP co-founder Abhijeet Dipke asked him to focus on his faulty products, “about which even the Supreme Court said there’s deception.” Gen Z, Dipke retaliated, would handle culture, democracy and the country without his help.
Ramdev might go on offering it. Relevance is the one thing he cannot simply manufacture.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
I lost all faith in Ramdev after he sought to make a quick buck during the country’s most vulnerable time.
Remember Coronil?
That treatment or prophylaxis with no research that was peddled to unsuspecting masses.
Clearly fraudulent.
This is only what we know.
Avoid his products, embrace his Yoga. The latter is free.