I guess the lesson is that eventually, if you are lucky, the Indian legal and political system churns into actions ...
or your karma will come home to roost ... but it is not impossible to rule out that there are other political undertones to the current events. It also about
the nature of power, and the business of religion in India.
Incidentally, one report states that
Ram Rahim "raped a 16-year-old girl" for hours in an 1995 incident up on Mount Abu, where the Brahma Kumaris have their headquarters. So much for Mount Abu being "the most holy place on earth" and the only place "pure" enough for "God" to incarnate in person.
What a joke.
Abu's a honeymoon resort. What do people do on their honeymoon? Mount Abu is probably one of the most sexed up places in India outside of "red light" zones.
In comparison to other cults, the Brahma Kumaris have kept their indulgences fairly low key, have invested hugely in sucking up to the Establishment such as politicians and the judiciary. They have fine tuned a skilled response to controlling and sweetening up the media, local and national. I wonder where that "intelligence" came from ... I suppose partly as a reaction to the troubles it suffered - at its own fault - in the early days.
Furthermore, with all their expensive retreat properties, quasi-corporate facades, and hospital management they now have new weapons in their armoury; invitations to free retreats, "management" training, and free health services etc.
What they call "service" is really just self-service and public relations, it's not really "service" (seva) at all. It's just designed to hide their real agenda and real beliefs. I sort of disgusts me that they spend so much of their wealth doing so, and on social climbing. Chasing and sucking up to the rich and powerful rather than uplifting the poor.
Meanwhile, at the bottom of their power pyramid, the poor, the weak, the vulnerable are still exploited. Families and relationships are broken and individuals' life pointlessly consumed.
I know the Indian government has given them a little squeeze over their cash based donation system and made things a little more difficult for them in that department but I am not sure they do anything bad enough to warrant a large scale investigation.
I'd be interested to know how much money they have, and how much jewellery and gold they have in their reserves. There may be some dubiousness in all that, for example, in the way they move money around. But I suspect their wrong doings are mainly in the moral and spiritual realms and fall mainly outside of the legal system.
Removing all and any sex from their equation has removed the most likely criticism ... It's a funny thing when society turns a blind eye to all the 1,000s of broken families and young people the Brahma Kumaris eat their way through, but becomes furious simply because a few adults are turning each other on.
Al Jazeera poses a good article on
the background to the social and political elements of the Dera system and quotes academics making good points, especially relating the influence of the neoliberal economic regime starting from the 1990s. I wonder how BKism has adopted to that? Perhaps the Brian Bacon "Self Management Leadership" and all the corporate consulting element arose as a response to it?
"The state is there only to look after law and order. So, in this situation, those who were already poor and did not have much resources, found this new system of [the] neoliberal economy a lot more difficult. This can be the one reason they go to dera ...
Dignity, social support, medical help, and food security. These are precisely the things that the modern Indian state - at least in its Haryana/Punjab version - refuses to offer to the people ... The deras here seem to go beyond providing people with mental succour and start providing those services that should have been given by the state."
But as deras grew rapidly in the past two decades, political parties started to make the rounds of these communities to gain electoral support. Political science professor Jagroop Singh Sekhon, from Guru Nanak Dev University, has called deras the "ATMs of vote banks".
"Once babas become powerful they attracted [a] large number of people, who are not only followers, they are also voters, and that brought politicians to babas," Ram said.