ISKCON bhakts wage war against gurus, on the Net

NEW DELHI, July 6: A cyber war has broken out on the Net over the rot in the leadership of the International Society of Krishna Consciousnes...

NEW DELHI, July 6: A cyber war has broken out on the Net over the rot in the leadership of the International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). The Society, which was set up in 1966 and boasts of 500 centres across the globe, is not new to controversies. But this time the spiritual ante has been upped in India, and insiders say the ISKCON bubble is ready to burst.

Heading a mini-revolt against the ISKCON leadership is Vineet Narain, Editor of Kalchakra, who says he joined the “faith” in 1992 but was now set to expose the wheeling-dealings of the so-called gurus. Narain says he would be joining hands with the Prabhupad Anti-Defamation Action (PADA) group, whose activists have been flooding the Net with missives against ISKCON leaders.

Narain explains that while unrest in ISKCON has been simmering for years, things were now coming to a head. Devotees had been challenging their gurus all over India — a few days ago devotees in Bangalore “defeated” their American guru — and a historiccongregation to thrash out the issue of degeneration of leadership was being convened tomorrow (July 7).

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“The ISKCON gurus are required to follow a life of simplicity and austerity which the founder Swami Prabhupada did,” Narain explains. “Instead they are lording over a multi-million dollar empire, symbolised by chartered planes, Rolex watches and silk robes. I am determined to expose the frauds the ISKCON gurus are committing.”

ISKCON followers in other cities agree that a chain reaction had been set off against the show of ostentation and opulence at their centres and temples. Satish Kapur, a businessman from Amritsar, says that while he continued to follow the basic philosophy and tenets of ISKCON, he felt the new-generation gurus had ruined everything. “They consider themselves to be gods and expect us to renounce everything for them. Why should we donate properties and leave our families for men who have opened shops in the name of religion?” he demands.

Agitated ISKCON followers citeexamples of the series of scandals to which some of the 70-odd gurus of the Society have been linked. Cases of molestation, sodomy and smuggling involving the gurus have been reported in Europe and USA.

Two recent developments have hastened the pace of dissension and the ripples have reached India via the Net. The first lot of documents downloaded by irate followers were the contents of a “discussion paper” on Srila Prabhupada’s instructions for “initiation within ISKCON” which the Governing Body Commission (GBM) had asked for in 1996.

Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More

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