Cult’s leader a ‘Netaji incarnate’ with Rs 4000 cr in assets, 250 luxury cars

New Delhi/Agra: On January 23 1975, the 78th birth anniversary of Subhash Chandra Bose, Phoolbagh in Kanpur was jam-packed with thousands of people who had been eagerly waiting to see the “resurrection” of their beloved leader — the man who promised freedom for blood and led the Azad Hind Fauj.
It had been announced earlier through pamphlets, hoardings and word of mouth, which went on for months, that Netaji would resurface on the said day at the venue. After several hours of suspense, a man, advanced in age and with a long-flowing white beard, appeared on the dais. Suddenly, almost from nowhere, there were shouts from a motley group that screamed: “Netaji zindabad”.

There was absolute silence in the crowd for the next few minutes as people stood silent, stunned in disbelief. But as soon as the man supposed to be Netaji began to speak, there was a volley of shoes and stones hurled at him. As he tried to run for cover, he was caught and thrashed severely by the people who had converged to catch a glimpse of Subhash Chandra Bose and felt outraged at the betrayal. Had police not intervened in time and whisked the imposter away, he would have been lynched that day.

That was the end of Jai Gurudev’s tryst as Netaji’s doppelganger, his incarnation even. But it certainly wasn’t the end of his brush with controversies.
In the 1980s, the so-called spiritual leader founded his ‘Doordarshi Party’, with a message of social reform and spiritual uplift. In the 1989 general elections, it put up as many as 298 candidates in a dozen-odd states, including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Maharashtra and Delhi, drawing a blank at the hustings. In nearly two decades of its existence, as the Doordarshi Party kept up its political ambitions, it could not make any electoral impact and disappeared from the radar without a trace.

All this while, though, Gurudev didn’t stop making money — lots of it. When the self-proclaimed godman died on May 18, 2012, his enormous assets were said to be worth Rs 4,000 crore. Apart from land, which constituted most of this, there was Rs 100 crore in cash and over 250 luxury cars worth over Rs 150 crore. Gurudev himself always said that everything he did was legal and was bought from donations by his followers. But there were a few other explanations as well.

In the year 2000, the Uttar Pradesh State Industrial Development Corporation filed 16 cases in various Mathura courts accusing the godman’s ashram of encroaching upon hundreds of acres of industrial land. In the same year, the regional archaeological survey of India office alleged that Gurudev’s disciples had damaged 14 mounds of historical importance by “digging in search of ancient artefacts” or “(while trying to) construct an ashram”. The ASI said no artefact had been handed over to the government body. The then Mathura district magistrate, Sanjeev Mittal, said he received 23 complaints from farmers, alleging that their land had been taken over forcibly by the ashram.

Seen in this light, the police action in Mathura on Thursday that followed an Allahabad high court order to clear the Jawahar Bagh area, which supporters of Gurudev had encroached upon for over two years now, seems to have come a tad too late. Well, 16 years to be precise.