The Brahma Kumaris supposedly "feminist" credentials have often been questioned, whether from point of view of their "authority" being given by the channelling of a male spirit guide, or from the observation of their not challenging but instead simple usurping of the patriarchal roles within a still caste bound society.
That is to say that the BKs are not "liberating" other women, but merely taking over the patriarchal positions and turning other women, often young or socially challenged women, into their unpaid servants or slaves. Married off 'en masse' to their male god spirit ... one has to question how much those young women understand about what is going on, especially when their leaders' account of their own ever mutating religion has been found false, erroneous and misleading time and time again.
Early in the history of the BK cult, its super-wealth businessman founder safeguarded his wealth and property from threatening law suits by placing it in a trust controlled by the very wives and teenage daughters of the men who were suing him. He used them as a front to deflect criticisms of his self-claimed "god-hood" and intimate indulgences with them.
This has been translated as "female empowerment" by the BK PR spin doctors. Hardly ... the canny businessman was just using them and continued to run the cult from behind them. A system that continues until this day, the "business" of the cult largely being controlled by powerful elder Brothers behind the scence; the simple, even mentally ill elder Sisters acting out as a front for them.
Accepting the Brahma Kumaris are, in essence, merely usurping the position of the male Brahmin caste within Indian societies, the question here is ...
Are Brahma Kumaris also usurping the traditional Indian Mother-Daughter/Mother-Son relationships ... not resolving and developing those stereotypical psychologies but, in fact, not exploiting them for their own benefit?
That is to say that the BKs are not "liberating" other women, but merely taking over the patriarchal positions and turning other women, often young or socially challenged women, into their unpaid servants or slaves. Married off 'en masse' to their male god spirit ... one has to question how much those young women understand about what is going on, especially when their leaders' account of their own ever mutating religion has been found false, erroneous and misleading time and time again.
Early in the history of the BK cult, its super-wealth businessman founder safeguarded his wealth and property from threatening law suits by placing it in a trust controlled by the very wives and teenage daughters of the men who were suing him. He used them as a front to deflect criticisms of his self-claimed "god-hood" and intimate indulgences with them.
This has been translated as "female empowerment" by the BK PR spin doctors. Hardly ... the canny businessman was just using them and continued to run the cult from behind them. A system that continues until this day, the "business" of the cult largely being controlled by powerful elder Brothers behind the scence; the simple, even mentally ill elder Sisters acting out as a front for them.
Accepting the Brahma Kumaris are, in essence, merely usurping the position of the male Brahmin caste within Indian societies, the question here is ...
Are Brahma Kumaris also usurping the traditional Indian Mother-Daughter/Mother-Son relationships ... not resolving and developing those stereotypical psychologies but, in fact, not exploiting them for their own benefit?