Dear Baba Ramdev,
You had everything going for you – a large and devoted following ready to stand by your anti-corruption campaign for as long as you could carry it. Your followers not only came to Ramlila Maidan at their cost, but they also dipped in their pockets and gave you money as their gesture of support to the movement. Not surprisingly, you were the envy of politicians because most of them have to ferry people at their own cost as well as offer them monetary and other bribes in order to bring them to their rallies. The numerous trusts and institutions you have set up are flush with funds. You have an army of dedicated cadres spread across the country who could mobilize millions for your movement to get back to India the ill gotten wealth of our bureaucrats and politicians in secret foreign bank accounts and yet you messed it all up. The bizarre drama you enacted to escape arrest by the Delhi Police – jumping down from a 14 ft high stage, expecting women cadres to form a protective ring around you and finally fleeing the pandal disguised in female clothing, leaving thousands of your followers to face the police wrath, was far more shocking than the vandalism and lawlessness Delhi Police or the venality of those who ordered such a crackdown. We are used to governments ordering such crackdowns. We are used to our police behaving like an army of invaders.
But we were not prepared for such undignified behaviour by a yoga guru. This is how petty thieves and pickpockets behave, not yogis who are loved and revered by millions. No amount of explanations will help you live down this ignominy.
Worse still you responded to this public humiliation you invited upon yourself by announcing that you will train a private militia to give a fitting response to police action for your next round of agitation. It must have thrilled the Maoists and Naxalites to hear you say that your firsthand experience of government repression has helped you understand why they have taken to the gun. In you, they have found a more effective defender of their politics than Arundhati Roy. But then you don’t have the gumption and courage of Maoists, many of who are ready to kill and die for their mission. You backtracked your statement the moment you were faced with Chidambram’s open threat and a hostile media reaction.
Your press conference in Delhi meant to give your version of the events turned out to be no less disappointing. Your explanation that you ran away in female attire, with your face covered by a long ghooghat to hide your foot-long beard because you did not want to be hunted like a wolf by the police, made you sound even more laughable and cowardly. Firstly, there was not a chance in a million that if you had allowed yourself to be arrested in full view of TV cameras, any physical harm would have come your way. In fact, you would have emerged a hero in the public eye. More importantly, a person who is so afraid of dying ought not to assume confrontationist postures vis a vis the government. The quintessential quality of a satyagrahi is not his or her ability to stay without food for a certain number of days but to be absolutely fearless in the face of repression, including the prospect of death. Therefore, yours may have been a peaceful agitation; it was far from being a satyagraha.
Equally important, a satyagrahi does not indulge in angry hysterical outbursts or harbour ill will against his/her opponent. Nor is a satyagrahi allowed to tell lies, exaggerate or overstate his case. The manner in which you entered into a secret agreement with the 4 ministers who took you to Claridges Hotel to persuade you to give up your threat of indefinite fast and the manner in which you tried dodging on that agreement, the way you raved and ranted against the government after being nabbed by the police, exaggerating the risk to your personal life, shows that you have not yet inculcated the most elementary qualities expected of a soldier of peace. If only you had spent some time watching the young Swami Nigmanand of Matri Sadan in Haridwar embrace death with perfect calm and dignity after his 75-day long satyagraha, including fast unto death, for protecting Ma Ganga from politically patronized mining mafias, you would have understood what it takes to be a satyagrahi. This was the 7th such prolonged Satyagraha by sanyasis of Matri Sadan. Each time they maintained perfect calm and equanimity and ended their fasts only when the administration was forced to issue orders to end illegal mining. They neither chased the press for publicity nor agreed to unholy compromises even when death stared them in the face. Unfortunately, even though you live in the same city, you did not bother to lend even token support to Matri Sadan’s heroic battle for saving Ganga because you were too busy with your own partisan agendas.
Till recently you were considered the most potent advertisement for the miraculous powers of Yog. By your undignified behaviour on the night of June 6, you proved to the world that the inner calm that comes to genuine practitioners of yog has escaped you altogether. Therefore, this is not the time for knee jerk reactions, angry outbursts or forcing yourself on a reluctant Anna Hazare’s bandwagon by announcing that you will join his fast on August 16, 2011. Not long ago, Team Hazare wooed you to make common cause in the anti-corruption movement because of your countrywide massive support base. Today, they see you as a liability. In any case, even Anna Hazare’s threat of fast unto death has lost its potency. When used so lightly, this brahmastra loses its moral value and potency.
This is time for serious introspection. Maybe you should start by taking a course in the “Art of Living” from Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. Like you, he too was an integral part of the anti-corruption movement. But he showed no sign of upset by the fact that like you, his organization was also sidelined when it came to Team Hazare nominating members of the drafting committee for the Lokpal Bill. He not only retained his calm but acted as your healer and saved you from continuing your futile hunger strike in hospital.
To start with you need to seriously review the manner in which you practice and propagate yog. Even the most elementary text or instructor, leave alone a real guru, teaches us that yog is not just physical exercise. It involves bringing body and mind in perfect union and harmony. Hence its emphasis on breathing, the very manifestation of life force in each of us. But pranayam is not the same as “breathing exercises” for losing weight or curing this or that ailment. It is an endeavour to gain total concentration and inner equilibrium by shutting out the noises and distractions of the outside world. It aims to bring a person in harmony with the cosmic energy—the merging of Atma and Paramatma. As someone who made a sincere attempt to follow your yog lessons on TV, I gave up in total disappointment because you don’t let your pupils a minute of peaceful reflection, leave alone time for concentration. For every one or two minutes of yoga asanas, one is subjected to 10 minutes of sermons and harangues on this or that issue.
I admire the way in which you have succeeded in convincing millions to eat healthy satvic food, to avoid junk food and dependence on the allopathic system of medicines whose indiscriminate use does more harm than good. It is also admirable the way you teach people to take charge of their own health by adopting healthy lifestyles and ordinary home remedies in tune with ayurvedic principles. But your excessive demonization of the allopathic system and exaggerated claims for yog weakens your case.
I also admire the way you lighted the spark in millions to stand up and fight corruption in governance. But when you mix yog with political or dietary sermons you take away from the seriousness of both. They need to be kept in separate compartments. Yog lessons lose their intrinsic worth if you keep mixing them with your aspiration to build a strong political organization.
There is another serious flaw in your style of teaching yog. When you bring several thousand people together for a two-hour class in a large public ground, people are expected to follow your complicated yog asanas by watching you on giant TV screens, doing what they can in their own way with very little monitoring. Yog cannot be imparted like you teach PT to school children. Yog needs close individual attention to ensure that the person who is being taught is able to get the right posture and right breathing. Yog also requires paying close attention to the individual ailments and stamina of the concerned person. Otherwise, it becomes a drill session.
You have every right to nurture political ambitions or build a wealth-generating ayurvedic empire with your marketing genius. But to earn the honorific of a yoga guru, you need to acquire some inner calm. Otherwise, you give Yog a bad name.
Similarly, the haste with which you have opened a chain of ayurvedic clinics has meant poorly trained, mal educated, under qualified young people acting as ayurvedic doctors. Their way of prescribing medicine is no different from that of a run of the mill allopaths. For headache, take X, for liver malfunction take ABC and so on. Ayurved does not treat the human body as a mechanical sum total of so many organs. It takes a holistic view of the body and the genesis of disease. Very few of your army of hastily trained male and female Vaids know anything beyond the prescribed list of medicines you have provided them from your production centres. This trivializes the grandeur of Ayurveda as a science of healing. Though influenced by the marketing model of Macdonald’s fast food outlets, the vaids appointed at your ayurvedic clinics lack the rigour of adopted by Macdonalds’ quality control mechanisms. I sincerely hope at least your herbal medicines live up to your claim of high standards.
Finally, if you wish to succeed in influencing or cleansing the politics of India, you have to understand that electoral politics requires a different genius altogether. Diagnosing social and political ills requires as rigorous a training as is required for mastering the art of Ayurved. First of all, you have to learn the art of team work and acknowledge your limitations. It is naïve of you to assume that you alone and single-handedly have found cures for all social and political ills. The demand list you submitted to the Government sounds like “A Crank’s Manifesto”—with some sensible but many absolutely laughable ideas. They belong to the same league as your claim that you can “cure” homosexuality through pranayam!
Most important of all, that list hastily put together demands diverted attention away from your main plank that the Government take necessary steps to enact a strong anti-corruption law. Unless you collect a team of wiser and better-educated persons who have experience of handling complex political and economic issues to help and guide you will never get a serious hearing.
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This is the unedited version of the article published in The Times of India of 18th July 2011 under the title: “The Way of Satyagraha”