Baba The Beast

The convicted guru’s cult unravels, revealing a sordid world of political influence, sexual violence and allegations of murder.

- Asit Jolly

Twenty years of hard labour and a Rs 30.2 lakh fine for two counts of rape and criminal intimidation. His jail term, the judge told Singh, would be extended by an additional four years in the event of any default in depositing the fine. What occurred next is most revealing: an apparently devastated Singh turned remorseful. “Mujhe maaf kar dijiye (please forgive me),” bawled the convict, who only days ago was the omnipotent spiritual guru of Dera Sacha Sauda, with a claimed following of 70 million doting adherents. Eyewitnesses—jail guards present at the hearing—say Singh wailed and needed to be physically removed to the prison cell that will be his home for the next two decades. The fateful afternoon at the model jail outside Rohtak city, safely distant from the dera followers concentrated largely in Sirsa and Punjab’s Malwa region, was a huge come down from the massive power, influence and political clout that was at Singh’s command while he was still a free man.

“Hamein maarna apne aap ko maarne ke barabar hai (To kill me is akin to killing yourself).” This opening line of the trailer of MSG: The Messenger of God, Singh’s cinematic debut in January 2015, was meant to be a grim warning to all those who opposed him. The message: it would not be easy to take him down. And he wasn’t too wrong. After all, it took 15 years, over 200 court hearings and the dogged perseverance of the two young sadhvis (one of them a minor) who first accused Singh of raping them. “There is no doubt that I am God,” the beastly baba had said to ‘Prosecutrix A’, the young Kurukshetra girl who courageously described her torment in a 2002 letter to then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.