The Lord Have Mercy

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Now, a decade later, more skeletons are tumbling out of the closet in India. A major legal war, no less, is going on between the Mumbai and the Bangalore centres over control of property worth an estimated Rs 500 crore on the Hare Krishna Hill at Rajaji Nagar in Bangalore. Madhu Pandit Dasa, president of the ISKCON Bangalore temple, insists that the trouble started in 1998. “The trigger point was the fall of Harikesa swami. We had been told that he was a great sanyasi guru, a great spiritual leader. He had over 3,000 disciples, mainly in Europe. When he left ISKCON to marry a massage therapist and left with millions of dollars, we were naturally stunned.”

The Hare Krishna hill, in Bangalore. The latter project, said to be worth Rs 500 cr, is at the heart of the conflict. (Photography by Jagadeesh N.V.)

And this high-ranking-guru-turning-rogue wasn’t a one-off. Of the original 11 disciples appointed by Srila Prabhupada (the founder of ISKCON) for the management of the movement worldwide, nine have “fallen from grace”, with cases ranging from child molestation to murder, embezzlement, sexual abuse, homosexuality, opulent living and duping disciples registered against them. The “latest guru to fall” is Prabhuvishnu Swami, who left ISKCON Australia in 2011 to live in Bangkok with a commercial sex worker he had met there, says Madhu Pandit. After Srila Prabhupada died in 1977, 41 gurus have left ISKCON, many allegedly making off with large sums of trust money. Which is why the Bangalore branch says it doesn’t want anything to do with the rest of the movement in India which is, incidentally, headed by Mumbai.

ISKCON Mumbai has technically been the nodal agency for all the temples and branches in the country. They allege that the Bangalore camp is out on a smear campaign. “This is simply a case of Madhu Pandit and his family members trying to usurp the Bangalore property,” says Dayaram Das, spokesperson for ISKCON’s 22-member bureau in India. He alleges that Madhu Pandit forged the signature of their temple president in Vrindavan on a letter written to life members to woo them away from Mumbai. “Before this happened, we were trying to make peace but we had to take action against the letter because it was an act of indiscipline and insubordination,” says Dayaram Das. He also claims that Madhu Pandit rents the premises of the temple in Bangalore to trusts run by himself or his family members.

Hare Hare Iskcon devotees in Lucknow strike up a bhajan. (Photograph by Nirala Tripathi)

The Bangalore camp says Mumbai can’t accept the fact that the city’s Hare Krishna Hill and the Akshaya Patra projects are extremely successful—and solely developed by them. They say despite the repeated attempts of many devotees, it was only in 1998 that there was even a discussion in India about why so many gurus had “fallen”. They also discovered a document—famously called the “July 9 letter” in ISKCON higher circles—where Prabhupada had left instructions that after him there would only be “ritviks” or representative acharyas who would initiate disciples in his name.

“The governing body council (GBC), even when Prabhupada was alive, had tried to replace the federal organisational structure, where each temple functioned as a separate legal entity, with a centralised, bureaucratic structure,” says Chanchalpati Dasa, Madhu Pandit’s brother-in-law and vice-chairperson. This move was countered by Prabhupada by dissolving the GBC temporarily. However, after he died, ISKCON was divided like an empire among the 11 disciples (none of them Indians), with each proclaiming they were gurus by disciple-succession. New recruits had to worship them as gurus and Prabhupada was ascribed the role of “founder-acharya”, accuses Chanchalpati. “I made a presentation to the GBC, asking them to revert to Prabhupada’s original instructions,” says Pandit.

The GBC immediately expelled him, his brother-in-law and another colleague, Adridharam Das, who was at the time the Calcutta temple president and a pro-reform proponent. However, being only a so-called ‘ecclesiastical body’ with no legal powers, the GBC asked ISKCON Mumbai to legally remove all the three from the movement. The Mumbai chapter says they were only acting on behalf of the global body in expelling these “rebels”. Dayaram Dasa says Madhu Pandit and co should have sued the governing body, not the Mumbai branch. “I am also against these corrupt gurus and the way ISKCON is being affected by it all. But it’s an internal matter and should be resolved internally. Pandit has dragged it out into the open only as an excuse to usurp the property in Bangalore...which actually belongs to Mumbai,” he says.

So as charges fly thick and fast, it’ll now be the courts who finally decide the real ISKCON contenders. The high court verdict went against the Bangalore faction, which they have since challenged. In this war of faith, the one left bemused is the ordinary ISKCON devotee.