The Telegraph
2 October 2009
Viveik healer leads Sangh cow drive
Monk push for ‘worthy sons’
by RADHIKA RAMASESHAN
[Photo] Suresh Oberoi touches Ashok Singhal’s feet at the Vishwa Mangala Gau Gram Yatra at Kurukshetra on Wednesday. Ramakant Kushwaha
Kurukshetra, Oct. 1: Looking to breathe life into a tired old theme, the Sangh parivar has turned to a young swami who had pepped up a Viveik Oberoi mooning over the loss of Aishwarya Rai.
Swami Raghaveshwara Bharati, pontiff of Ramachandra Mutt in Karnataka’s Shimoga, yesterday flagged off the four-month, nation-wide Vishwa Mangala Gau Gram Yatra for cow protection, sponsored by the RSS, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and sundry mahants.
Although the VHP’s Ashok Singhal couldn’t help making strident anti-minority remarks as he demanded a ban on cow slaughter, the RSS pitched the yatra in softer tones, arguing that saving the cow meant a return to a rural idyll. Enough to have even Gandhians from Vinoba Bhave’s ashram join in.
No central BJP leader was present, but it may not be a coincidence that the yatra comes right before the Assembly elections in three states including Haryana.
The man who really enthused the crowd at the Brahma Sarovar, in a town where every vacant space is supposed to have been a Pandava-Kaurava battlefield, was Suresh Oberoi. The former actor kept following the swami throughout.
Three years ago, Suresh had sent broken-hearted son Viveik to the 40-something swami’s hermitage in Hosanagar among the arecanut plantations. The monk’s disciples claimed he had cured Viveik of his “heartache”.
The swami has powerful votaries in Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa and his predecessor H.D. Kumaraswamy, to both of whom he had gifted a rare cow of a dying indigenous stock.
The swami has been a doer, his mission being to revive the local strains of cows, cleansing the cattle population of the hybrid Jerseys and restoring the “forgotten” spiritual bond between the gau mata (mother cow) and her errant sons.
So he seemed a good bet to flag off the yatra, a ride on a motorised bus painted with a cow and scenes of rural peace that is to climax in a rally at the Sangh’s Nagpur headquarters four months on.
He did not grate on the ears like Singhal, who took swipes at kasais (butchers) and demanded the secular state be “banished”. Nor was he as staid as the Sangh’s second-in-command, Suresh “Bhaiyya” Joshi, who merely said: “The village is India’s soul and the cow is the soul of the village and should be cherished.”
In a mellifluous voice, the swami craved Mother Cow’s forgiveness for humankind’s sins and promised that just as Krishna had made a “man” out of Arjuna in Kurukshetra, every male present would morph into her “worthy sons”.
Indresh, the pranth pracharak (state propagandist), said this would be the Sangh’s line during the yatra to try and strengthen its networks in rural India.
Nobody — neither the mahants nor the Sangh-VHP representatives or the handful of local BJP leaders present —was willing to wager on the programme’s success, considering that all of them had used “cow protection” in their discourses periodically with little impact.
The sceptics were reminded that when the VHP had kicked off the Ram temple campaign in 1984 with a Ram Shila Yatra, nobody had taken it seriously.
“But that was because the BJP had politicised it,” a Sangh source said. Today nobody was sure if a down-and-out L.K. Advani would ride yet another chariot for the sake of a holy cow.
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