India has a godman problem, and Swami Chaitanyananda Saraswati is only the latest entrant on the dishonour rolls.
Last week, Saraswati, who is the director of a private engineering and management institute in Delhi’s Vasant Kunj and a self-styled spiritual guru, was arrested after being on the run for a few days. Seventeen women students, all scholarship holders from economically weaker sections, have accused him of sexual harassment, obscene messages, and forced late-night visits to his room. I wish I could say I was shocked by this horrible news, but shock requires novelty. I am only fatigued by the tedious predictability of it all.
The charges against Saraswati are drawn from the modern Indian baba starter pack. The checklist includes: Sexual exploitation of vulnerable women. Hidden cameras installed in the women’s hostel for leverage. Delusions of grandeur, in the form of a luxury Volvo with a forged UN diplomatic number plate. And a protective layer of female enablers in positions of authority, who allegedly pressured students to comply with the guru’s demands. All of these cogs worked in tandem in the well-oiled machine of coercion.
According to the FIR, Saraswati would force female students to visit his room late at night and even accompany him on trips abroad. The WhatsApp messages, leaked to the media, reveal the relentless nature of his pursuit: “Good evening, my sweetest baby doll daughter,” followed hours later by “You will not sleep with me? Speak.” When the students resisted, they were threatened with suspension, expulsion, and their degrees and documents being withheld. One student was allegedly forced to change her name against her will, a particularly disturbing assertion of control.
According to reports, “Saraswati has repeatedly lied during interrogation, even when he was confronted with evidence”. This clearly isn’t Saraswati’s first rodeo. In 2006 and 2016, molestation cases were registered against him. Yet in 2025, he was still in charge of an educational institution. The Sringeri Peetham, which runs the institutes, has now severed all ties with him, labelling his conduct “illegal, inappropriate, and detrimental.” I wonder why this disavowal took so long and arrived only after the investigation went public.
Ashram Industrial Complex
Saraswati’s case is unremarkable because it fits so neatly into the “Ashram Industrial Complex”, a sprawling ecosystem where self-styled godmen operate with near-total impunity. An opaque shroud covers the goings-on at an ashram, and the guru’s power flows on the back of ignorance. Several ashram empires, like those of Asaram and Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insaan, are spread across townships, and include services like hospitals and educational institutions. In these mini republics, the devotees give babas carte blanche. And reality—or minor inconvenient facts like conviction by the actual republic—rarely interfere with the baba’s stature.
Asaram is serving a life sentence since 2018 for the rape of a minor at his ashram and has been implicated in multiple murder cases. His followers, however, estimated to be in the region of two crore, spread across 400 ashrams globally, maintain that the conviction was a media-orchestrated conspiracy. The empire, which brought in an annual revenue of Rs 350 crore in 2021, continues to function.
Gurmeet Ram Rahim was convicted in 2017 for the rape of two female disciples and later for the murder of journalist Ram Chander Chhatrapati, who had exposed sexual exploitation at his Dera Sacha Sauda. His followers responded to that by unleashing mass riots across Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Delhi—burning vehicles, attacking railway stations, and forcing the deployment of thousands of paramilitary personnel. The violence left over 30 dead and caused property damage estimated in hundreds of crores. Ram Rahim’s own net worth is estimated at around Rs 1,455 crore.
Rampal’s followers staged a three-day armed standoff with Haryana police in 2014, when authorities attempted to execute a court warrant and arrest him. “Baba’s Commandos” held off the police armed with acid pouches, sticks and stones, and allegedly lobbed “petrol bombs” at them. The siege of his Satlok Ashram ended with multiple deaths.
The logical endpoint of the mini-republic model is secession. Case in point: The endlessly memefied-Nithyananda, accused of rape, child abuse, and kidnapping, who fled India and declared the establishment of “Kailasa”, his own sovereign nation. Before he fled, the net worth of his foundation was believed to be Rs 10,000 crore.
Dignity and belonging
Three pillars hold up the Ashram Industrial Complex: opaque finances enabled by toothless laws governing India’s religious trusts, political protection in exchange for mobilised vote banks, and a layer of institutional enablers. But none of this would exist if the baba wasn’t filling a gap in society—the dignity and sense of belonging, however illusory, that organised religion has failed to provide so many Indians. This desperation cuts across class, caste, and gender lines.
In Punjab and Haryana, deras like Sacha Sauda draw followers from disadvantaged Dalit and OBC communities. The dera offers what temples and gurdwaras have denied them. In an op-ed written in the aftermath of the 2017 riots, senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor stated: “A key message of Sikhism – equality among the faithful – has in the past inspired people from the lower Hindu castes to convert. But so deep is the prejudice in Indian society that many converted Sikhs found that their new co-religionists of higher castes, who dominate the faith’s official religious bodies, treated them no better than Hindus had.”
The deras, Tharoor said, helped reduce addiction and “replaced anomie with community”, so successive governments embraced them. The rioting that ensued Ram Rahim’s conviction grew from the fear of facing marginalisation once again. “They are willing to kill for him, because, as they might see it, they would really be killing for themselves,” Tharoor wrote. No rioting or killing is involved at the other end of the spectrum, where the Guruji (Nirmal Singh Maharaj) brigade sits, ensconced in luxury. But the spiritual needs and marginalisation felt by Delhi’s elite and Bollywood is the same as that of a dera member.
Underpinning this mass appeal is a financial scaffolding, upheld by loosely framed laws and the lack of regulatory oversight, that enables ashram empires to run almost unchecked. As this report in The Economic Times points out, religious trusts control crores of assets and, “with a few exceptions like the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam and Mumbai’s Siddhi Vinayak Temple, most do not make their accounts public”. Often, there is little transparency about who is in control of these funds and how these guardians are appointed. “When the religious outfit is a revered individual, it’s even harder to ascertain affairs since questioning is seen as tantamount to heresy.”
Another analysis of India’s religious trusts notes that Indian law does not sufficiently regulate anonymous donations to religious trusts. “There is no way to guarantee that a donation is genuinely anonymous, in the sense that the trustees really don’t know who the donor is.” This means an ashram can act as a black money laundering conduit. Then, there are “few meaningful restrictions on how religious trusts can spend the money they receive,” as long as 85 per cent of donations are theoretically disbursed for the trust’s stated purposes.
The rest is fair game. Unless the Enforcement Directorate comes knocking on your door, as it did earlier this year with Chhangur Baba. The agency has been collecting IT returns for the last 10 years from 40 entities, suspected of being shell companies, allegedly created and operated by the Baba and his associates. Six overseas bank accounts linked to these entities were used to route large sums from “Arab nations” that were in turn used to purchase properties worth Rs 100 crore in Uttar Pradesh, Pune, and Nagpur. “In addition to real estate, ED sources disclosed that the baba spent lakhs on foreign breed horses and dogs, which are also part of the probe.”
Also read: India’s youngest spiritual baba wants no friends, smartphones. What about homework, people ask
Wilful blindness
This opaqueness is built into the system, said Naman Saraiya, director of the 2022 docu-series on Nithyananda, My Daughter Joined a Cult. An inner circle of 20-30 people is in charge of running and managing the cult, bound together by mutually assured destruction. Secrets help maintain the hierarchy, and “to pledge allegiance, you give them information about your life”.
Saraiya said that these could be early financial records or compromising photos. “In Nithyananda’s case, all the compromising information was stored in the cloud,” he told me. This inner circle then lives in fear of each other. “Everyone is on edge. Everyone is trying to one up the other.” The compromised often become the compromisers, manipulated into exploiting others.
Saraiya pointed out that it took a long time for Nithyananda to fall out of political favour. That’s partly because no political faction is immune to the charms of babas. Every party, every ideology, has patronised them: Indira Gandhi was famously a disciple of Dhirendra Brahmachari, dubbed India’s Rasputin for his influence over the Gandhis. Her Home Minister and later PM, PV Narasimha Rao, fell under the sway of Chandraswami, a tantrik who claimed he could read minds. In 2007, UPA presidential candidate Pratibha Patil had declared that the spirit of Dada Lekhraj, dead since 1969, had told her “more responsibility awaited her.” And in 2013, the same government authorised the Geological Survey of India and ASI to dig up a 19th-century palace based on godman Shobhan Sarkar’s dream about 1,000 tonnes of buried gold.
Somewhere in India, another Chaitanyananda Saraswati is plotting to exploit vulnerable women in his ashram. Another trust is accepting anonymous donations that will never be audited. The walls of unreason are fortified by legal loopholes and political compromise. But it’s our collective, wilful blindness that has laid the foundation.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)