Even Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh’s militant background was no deterrence to the legions of followers, who, of course, joyly overlooked his bling debauchery no less, brining the entire Dera culture under shadow
Ajay Bhardwaj
The mind-boggling ascendance of Gurmeet Singh to become Papa (Baba) Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh carried all the ingredients of a thriller. The son of a lowly agriculturalist in Sri Ganganagar district in Rajasthan Gurmeet Singh did not spend much time in schooling and took to driving as a profession. till his cousin, Gurjant Singh Rajasthani, the then chief of the Khalistan Commando Force (KCF) took him under his wings.
Dera Sacha Sauda was then headed by Shah Satnam Singh, a successor of Mastana Balauchistani, who had founded the Dera way back in 1948.
According to senior police officers, in 1990, when militancy was at its peak in Punjab and its peripheral areas, top militants were engaged in capturing properties and finding new hideouts. The Dera Sacha Sauda caught the eye of Gurjant Rajasthani who had started sending feelers to the aging Dera chief Shah Satnam Singh to vacate.
Militant Mentor
In September 1990 the KCF chief helped his cousin Gurmeet, who was barely 23, to take over the Dera control forcefully at the gunpoint, from Shah Satnam Singh. Under the tutelage of the KCF chief, Gurmeet Singh reportedly kept his predecessor as a hostage and started consolidating his position. Soon after taking over, Gurmeet Singh assumed a new name, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh and egged on his followers to use “Papa” as a prefix to his name.
The bling side There is a glittering bling side to it as well to the Dera chief and his headquarters. The dera houses a cinema hall that exclusively shows Gurmeet Ram Rahim’s movies. |
After Gurjant Singh Rajasthani was killed in an encounter in Mohali in September 1991, within three months Shah Satnam Singh, who was kept a hostage in the Dera, was also declared dead. According to police sources, the Dera remained in the police list as a suspected militant hideout for quite some time till militancy started declining post-1992. It was time for Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh to go full stream to beguile his followers. Women and weapons were his key operatives amid a sea of faith and trust that he started building up in the region.
Trail of TroublesTwo 10-year prison terms given to Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh by a special CBI court in two rape cases could just be the beginning of a trail of |
In the late nineties his criminal side was whole hog on the display, but his ruthless terror kept things under carpet for quite some time till the two rape victims sent an anonymous letter to the then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee detailing their plight in 2002 around the time when the infamous case of killing of Sirsa-based journalist Ram Chander Chhatrapati also came to light. The case is awaiting adjudication in the same CBI court that convicted Ram Rahim Singh in the two rape cases last week.
Amid a host of controversies, the Dera started undertaking so-called social welfare activities in order to salvage his image. The blood donation camps, girl marriages, medical camps et al were highlighted prominently by the media publicity group within the Dera. All this accompanied the lavish and flamboyant indulgence of the Dera chief in activities like films and car racing.
The devout followers saw no incongruities in all these bling sides of the Dera chief whose following kept swelling by thousands every passing day, so much so that even political leaders of all hues started making beelines at his Dera to curry electoral favours. No wonder the political leaders would dole out lakhs of rupees as a bounty to him to garner political gains.
Raises the Dust
However, the Dera chief had his first brush with the Sikh radicals in 2007 when the Parkash Singh Badal government registered a case of sacrilege against him for donning the attire of Guru Gobind Singh. That the case had its political overtones was made amply clear by the fact Badal was overtly annoyed with the Dera head for not supporting the Akali Dal in the 2007 Assembly elections. Amid the spate of violence that followed the Dera chief became an eyesore to
radicals who later made a violent attack on his cavalcade in 2008 near Karnal when he was returning from Ambala after attending a court date.
He has since been enjoying Z plus security, the highest that a VIP gets in India. In 2014, around 400 followers of his sect alleged Rahim to have castrated them. The case was handed over to the CBI for investigation. A Dera Sacha Sauda follower and the only witness in the case Hans Raj Chauhan had told the court that Rahim Chauhan, in his petition, had alleged that he, along with 400 other followers, were lured by the Dera chief to get their castration done.
The same year reports also emerged of arms training being imparted to the followers of Ram Rahim at the sect headquarters in Sirsa. After these reports, the Punjab and Haryana High Court ordered that the activities of the group should be monitored periodically.
A year later, in 2015, Rahim again courted controversy when the then censor board chief Leela Samson alleged that the government was forcing her to pass a movie made by Rahim. The film in question was ‘Messenger of God’, of which he was the lead actor, choreographer, singer, director, and producer. Rahim went on to make four more movies in which he played all these roles.
The build-up of lakhs of Dera followers in the run-up to the prosecution of Gurmeet Ram Rahim in Panchkula and the consequent violent confrontation that left 36 dead and hundreds of them injured just reflected the perverse glory under which the Dera chief had been basking.
The mammoth following, running into lakhs, that the Dera had built over the years, could not have helped going berserk in the face of rape charges against the person that they had adored and worshipped so tenaciously. This has not only brought into focus the activities of the Dera Sacha Sauda, but also that of the entire gamut of Deras that spawn the region. What do they do? Why do people follow them so much? Are the Deras centres of crime?
The Deras are a typical culture predominantly in Punjab and parts of Haryana, bordering Punjab. Officially, the total number of Deras in the region is estimated to be around 1200, but the leading ones, which have a
following of a lakh or more, are stated to be around 175.
Why so many Deras?
The mushroom growth of Deras is attributed primarily to the class division or the class divide among the communities that obtain in the region, whereby the Dalits do not find a place in the mainstream religious discourse and practice. Almost 90 per cent of the deras are catering to people who don’t constitute the upper crust of the
society. Be it in Haryana or Punjab. That is why Jats or Jaats, who form a majority community in the region, would not usually adhere to any Dera as such, nor would those coming from upper classes among the Hindus.
In Punjab, it is heterogeneous Sikh groups ( particularly non-Jats) who did not find a place in the Sikh institutions and organization which flocked the Deras. The Deras, in turn, have been able to offer to their followers’ dignity, equality, and belongingness which the mainstream religion could not do.
Radha Soamis, Sacha Sauda, Nirankaris, Namdharis, Divya Jyoti Jagaran Sansthan, Bhaniarawala and Ravidasias are among the most popular deras in the region.
Normally the Deras remain low-lying and restrain from ruffling feathers publicly unless a situation of confrontation arises when some Dera heads are perceived to encroaching on the Sikh tenets. It happened for the first time way back in the late seventies when the Nirankari Dera locked horns with the Sikhs because the Nirnakaris observed that Guru Granth Sahib was not the last guru, and the Dera chief would occupy a seat higher than that where Guru Granth Sahib would be placed. It led to a series of violent clashes in the wake of the rise of militancy in the state in the early eighties that subsequently led to the killing of the Nirankari chief in Delhi.
In the post-militancy times, it was Baba Piara Singh Bhaniara, founder of the Bhaniarawala Dera, who invited the wrath of radical Sikhs. In spite of the intervention of former Union Home Minister Buta Singh, the Dera chief made it to the hit list of radical Sikhs who asked him to stop praying from the Guru Granth Sahib. In October 2001 he was arrested for hurting the Sikh sentiments.
In the recent past, a near-fatal attack on Sant Niranjan Das, the Chief of Dera Sachkhand and the death of Sant Ramanand, the deputy chief, at the hands of the Sikh assailants in Vienna, Austria on May 24, 2009 set off violence in Punjab and Haryana, which claimed two lives and destroyed assets worth thousands of crores.
Another Dera which has been in
the eye of controversy is the Kapurthala-based Divya Jyoti Jagriti Sansthan (DJJS) started by Ashutosh Maharaj who was born as Mahesh Kumar Jha in 1946 in Madhubani district of Bihar. Amid controversy over its preachings, the Dera’s programmes were banned for some time in the 1990s by the state government. n
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