21-asaram-bapu-601A  72-year-old sadhu  is accused of sexually assaulting a teenage girl. Police go to his ashram for interrogation- baba makes the police wait for almost eight hours! Baba claims he is in meditation and the police listened. They know that the baba is being accused of a crime, still they wait – behavior of the police though not new is a proof the mess the country is in.

 

The 72-year-old Sadhu has an ashram in Jodhpur and has many followers. He threatened the victim to not tell anything to anybody. He tried to scare her by telling that a lot of harm will happen if she did. But, the girl still informed, which is remarkable. We have to start  educating our girls that it is not her fault that she was molested or raped. Molestation/rape happens not because the girl in question is good looking or is wearing provocative clothes or is by herself in an unprotected place-it happens because rapists/molesters have a criminal mindset.

 

Asaram Bapu the criminal in question has of course denied all charges the 15-year-old girl has made on him. To your surprise, he has not been arrested yet. He has been given till Friday to come up with some answers. He has said that this girl is like a granddaughter to him because her parents are his disciples.

 

Each town in India will have some sadhu that the people would treat God-like. Even after so many of these so called God’s men have been accused –their popularity has not declined. It’s just not the poor or uneducated who follow these babas blindly, its also the rich and highly educated who are blinded by the faith in these sadhus. OMG was such a successful film .It addressed the evil side of these fake babas – but in general nothing changed in India. People will continue believing their spiritual gurus instead of getting spiritual in true sense, which in my mind is treating truth as is, and not what some guru tells me.

 

This case of Asaram Bapu has become a subject of discussion (probably no action) in the Indian Parliament.

 

BJP Vice President Uma Bharti, who was mired in controversy over her tweet that said Asaram Bapu was innocent, has told NDTV that she is not running a campaign to save the self-styled godman. “I was not defending Asaram Bapu, what I was saying was there should be proper use of the law,” she said.

Written by Suchitra Sharma