Feature
The Billionaire Yogi Behind Modi’s Rise
Baba
Ramdev built a business empire out of mass yoga camps and ayurvedic
products. But is his pious traditionalism a mask for darker forces?
Baba Ramdev.CreditBharat Sikka for
The New York Times
On
a hazy day in early February, some of the most powerful men in India’s
government gathered at Chhatrasal Stadium in New Delhi, an arena famous
for its boisterous wrestling bouts. The men had come for a different
kind of spectacle
— a biographical film epic, whose initial episodes (out of 57 total)
would be shown for the first time that evening. At the center of a
makeshift stage, surrounded by smiling politicians and cabinet members,
was the person whose life was being celebrated:
a slender figure in saffron robes with a long, dark beard, his
chest-length hair tied in a bun. He needed no introduction. This was
Baba Ramdev, one of the most famous men in India.
Ramdev took the microphone and introduced the phalanx of several hundred Hindu religious students, known as
brahmacharis, sitting in neat rows on the field. Everyone repeat after me: “Bharat mata ki jai!” he shouted. The crowd raised their arms and pumped their fists as they chanted the words
— “India my motherland is great” — that have become a defining slogan of the Hindu nationalist movement.
One
by one, the dignitaries rose to recount Ramdev’s extraordinary career:
how he brought physical fitness to the Indian middle class with his mass
yoga camps and television empire; how he built his
medicine-and-consumer-goods
company, Patanjali Ayurved, into a multibillion-dollar colossus.
“Swamiji has changed the direction of the world, the thinking of the
world,” one speaker shouted, referring to Ramdev with an affectionate
honorific. “That is how great he is. Swamiji has changed
India, which was going toward the West — its dress and food and culture
— and has changed its direction to yoga!”
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At
last silence fell, and the 50-foot screen flickered to life. For the
next hour, India’s political elite watched in humble silence as Ramdev’s
life unfolded, from his birth in a remote rural village to his early
days as a lissome
yogi (the remaining episodes had been condensed into trailer form). As a
film, it was a shambolic melodrama that seemed to treat Ramdev almost
as a divine messenger. But as an expression of the Indian public’s
feelings, it wasn’t far off the mark.
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Ramdev
has been compared to Billy Graham, the Southern Baptist firebrand who
advised several American presidents and energized the Christian right.
The parallel makes some sense: Ramdev has been a prominent voice on the
Hindu
right, and his tacit endorsement during the landmark 2014 campaign
helped bring Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power. He appeared
alongside Modi on several occasions, singing the leader’s praises and
urging Indians to turn out for him. Ramdev has called Modi
“a close friend,” and the prime minister publicly lauds Patanjali’s
array of ayurvedic products — medicines, cosmetics and foodstuffs.
Although Modi campaigned heavily on promises to reform India’s economy
and fight corruption, there were frequent dog whistles
to the Hindu nationalist base, some of them coordinated with Ramdev. A
month before Modi’s landslide victory, a trust controlled by Ramdev
released a video in which senior leaders of Modi’s party, the Bharatiya
Janata Party (B.J.P.), including the current
ministers of foreign affairs, internal security, finance and
transportation, appeared alongside him with a signed document setting
out nine pledges. These included the protection of cows — animals held
sacred in Hinduism — and a broad call for Hindu nationalist
reforms of the government, the courts, cultural institutions and
education.. After Modi won, Ramdev claimed to have “prepared the ground
for the big political changes that occurred.”
But
Ramdev is far more than a useful holy man. Even beyond his political
patrons, Ramdev is the perfect messenger for a rising middle class that
is hungry for religious assertion and fed up with the socialist,
rationalist legacy
of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first post-independence leader. Ramdev has
led vastly popular campaigns against corruption, donning the mantle of
swadeshi,
or Indian economic nationalism, to cast foreign companies as
neocolonial villains. In a sense, Ramdev has changed Hinduism itself.
His blend of patriotic fervor, health and religious piety flows
seamlessly into
the harder versions of Hindu nationalism, which are often openly
hostile to India’s 172 million Muslims. Although Ramdev prefers to speak
of Indian solidarity, his B.J.P. allies routinely invoke an Islamic
threat and rally crowds with vows to build temples
on the sites of medieval mosques.
In
his own way, Ramdev is India’s answer to Donald Trump, and there is
much speculation that he may run for prime minister himself. Like Trump,
he heads a multibillion-dollar empire. And like Trump, he is a
bombastic TV personality
whose relationship with truth is elastic; he cannot resist a branding
opportunity — his name and face are everywhere in India. In May, he
announced plans to add
swadeshi
SIM cards to his ever-growing list of products: packaged noodles,
herbal constipation remedies, floor cleaner made with cow urine. He has a
gift for W.W.E.-style publicity stunts: Last year he “won” a televised
bout with an Olympic wrestler from Ukraine.
On
the surface, Ramdev’s blissful demeanor is worlds away from Trump’s
growls and sneers. But his namastes provide cover for a reactionary
campaign to transform the country. When challenged on his evasions and
slurs, Ramdev —
like the White House’s current occupant — tends to respond by pointing a
finger at “corrupt” figures in the secular elite. It seems to work.
Last year an Indian judge banned a critical biography of Ramdev before
it was released and then put a gag order on
its author, barring her from even mentioning the book on social media.
In a sense, Ramdev is more powerful than any prime minister. He may be a
wholly new breed: a populist tycoon, protected from critics (and even,
to some extent, from the law) by a vast following
and a claim to holy purpose.
The center of
Ramdev’s empire is in Haridwar, a small city on the Ganges near
the foothills of the Himalayas, about a four-hour drive northeast of
Delhi. It is a sacred place in Hindu legend, and thousands of pilgrims
gather there by the riverbanks every day. Not
far away is the town of Rishikesh, where the Beatles famously visited
Maharashi Mahesh Yogi in the late 1960s. But Ramdev’s operation is a far
cry from the ascetic ashrams of yesteryear. Patanjali’s main office
complex looks like an airport, with an odd, pagodalike
gate separating it from the rest of town. Inside, there are vast
parking lots, a cavernous employee cafeteria, lawns and fountains. You
might think you were in Silicon Valley if not for the jerseys reading
“Dept. of Yoga Science” that the University of Patanjali
students wear. I found myself staring at a statue of a bony, bearded
sage seated in the lotus position: It was Patanjali, the company’s
namesake, who some two millenniums ago is said to have compiled the
verses that are the foundation of modern yoga practice.
Ramdev
lives a few blocks away, behind another huge gate manned by armed
guards. (After Modi’s election, his government granted Ramdev the
second-highest level of state security while withdrawing it from some
leaders of the rival
Congress party.) The guards waved us through, and suddenly I found
myself in a quiet enclave of lush gardens. The heat and dust of India
seemed far away. We strolled along a brick path to a small bungalow, and
there was Ramdev, seated on a beautifully carved
wooden swing, laughing and chatting with a guest. He rose and greeted
me with a hug. I was struck by his slight stature; his bushy black
beard, gray at the fringes, seemed more substantial than his thin frame.
He emanated a loose-jointed warmth, like someone
who has just run a long distance. Apart from his thin saffron robes —
one wrapped around his chest and one at the waist — he wore only
padukas, the traditional platform wooden clogs with a metal post for the toes to grip.
“This
is my basic and ultimate mission,” he said, speaking in strongly
accented English. “I want a healthy, wealthy, prosperous and peaceful
person, society, nation.” He looked into my eyes and touched my forearm
as he spoke.
The left side of his face was paralyzed by a childhood illness, and the
resulting squint gives him a look of cockeyed intensity. “Health and
happiness, without yoga you cannot achieve,” he went on. “Yoga is my
basic work.” Ramdev practices and teaches yoga
every day from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m.,
in a hangarlike auditorium with hundreds of students and TV cameras
rolling, and then again (when he can) in the afternoon and evening from 5 until 7:30.
In between, he told me, he oversees Patanjali and its associated trusts
and charitable activities. He interspersed his earnest yoga talk with
playful banter, tossing his head back in giddy fits of giggling. When I
asked him if I could follow him around for a day or two, he seemed
delighted. “Of course! You can stay with me,” he
said, gesturing at the house behind us, where he sleeps on a pallet on
the floor. “I’m not married. But don’t worry, I’m not homosexual!” He
burst into raucous laughter and added, “I’m
against homosexuality!” The laughter got even louder, and he added under his breath, “Just kidding.”
I
was baffled for a moment, and then found myself marveling at his
legerdemain. As a Hindu monk, Ramdev has repeatedly declared his
disapproval of homosexuality, calling it “immoral and unnatural.” He
says it can be cured by
yoga. But he has the politician’s gift for charming his audience. In a
single, East-meets-West moment, he had both deferred to tradition and
hinted to me that he was a closet liberal. (He was also kidding about
the offer to sleep on his floor, as it turned
out.)
Ramdev’s
informality and practical bent set him apart from most other gurus.
Indian religious celebrities are known popularly as godmen, a word that
suggests stardom but also adds a hint of derision. They are heirs to an
ancient
tradition of humble, loincloth-clad wisdom seekers, but opportunism
seems to come with the territory as well. Some godmen have become
immensely rich and built cults of personality that stretched around the
globe. They tend to surround themselves with fawning
followers, and many claim to perform miracles, like Sathya Sai Baba,
who became notorious in the 1960s for conjuring Omega watches out of
thin air. Ramdev is not the first one to gain influence in politics; in
the 1970s Indira Gandhi often sought advice from
her own yoga teacher, who became known as the “Rasputin of Delhi.” But
Ramdev rarely clouds the air with talk about enlightenment and religion.
“My yoga is very simple,” he told me. “No critical postures. No
philosophy or ideology. All yoga practices are based
on benefit. Instant benefit.”
Ramdev
is also the first godman to earn his millions as a businessman instead
of just siphoning donations from wealthy followers. Patanjali has
vaulted in just over a decade from a tiny operation into an economic
powerhouse,
with $1.6 billion in sales in the current fiscal year. Turn on a TV or
glance at a billboard almost anywhere in India, and you are likely to
see Ramdev advertising one of its products. During our talk, Ramdev
boasted of Patanjali’s success, detailing his plans
for expansion and saying he aimed to reach about $15 billion in annual
sales by 2025, a figure that would make Patanjali one of India’s biggest
companies. But he also insisted that Patanjali is not a business at
all; it is “a service for humanity, for the
nation.” He maintains that neither he nor the company’s C.E.O., Acharya
Balkrishna, takes a salary. Ramdev says he doesn’t even have a bank
account (he abides by the monk’s vow of austerity and chastity, though
the company seems to more than take care of his
needs). All profits, he said, are plowed back into research and
charity, and the company’s low costs allow it to undersell competitors.
Most of Patanjali’s employees are paid much less than they would receive
elsewhere; asking for a raise is taboo. (A company
spokesman denies this.) They are forbidden to drink alcohol or eat
nonvegetarian food. “Penance in individual life, prosperity for others,”
Ramdev told me with a smile. This blend of fierce capitalism and
monkish renunciation is aimed at making India a “world
economic power and world spiritual power by 2050.”
Ramdev
told me his nationalist vision embraces all religions and castes, but
he added a revealing caveat. “Country first,” he said. “This is a must.
Not, ‘I’m great, my caste is great,’ but my country is great. Unlike
Muslim
leaders — they say Islam is great. I say, No: The nation is great, the
citizen is great.” And the nation, in Ramdev’s telling, is subtly
twinned with a history and culture that is distinctly Hindu: yoga,
ayurvedic medicine and the ancient Vedic scriptures
from which they are said to have emerged. Sometimes the hints are not
so subtle. Two years ago, when a Muslim politician refused to chant a
nationalist slogan, Ramdev laid into him at a right-wing rally, saying
that were it not for his respect for the law,
“we would behead hundreds of thousands” of such people. A court later
issued a warrant for Ramdev’s arrest, though the matter appears to have
been dropped.
Hindu nationalism rarely
made headlines in the West until the 1990s, when images of communal
riots and chanting B.J.P. supporters introduced many Americans to the
idea that there was
another, different kind of fundamentalism to worry about in South Asia.
But as a political force, Hindu nationalism predates India’s
independence in 1947 and reflects centuries of resentment among the
subcontinent’s Hindu majority. Hindus submitted reluctantly
to waves of Muslim conquest from the north starting almost a thousand
years ago, and then to almost 300 years of British domination. After
World War I, when the British Empire started to crack, some Hindu
ideologues saw an opportunity to regain the upper hand.
They began calling for an explicitly Hindu state and society, in which
Muslims (and other minorities) would be tolerated only if they respected
the majority culture. In one respect, it was an effort to counter
political Islam, which was already gaining adherents
in India and elsewhere in the early 1920s. But building a cohesive
movement was not easy. Classical Hinduism is more a conglomeration of
sects than a single religion; it has many ancient scriptures but no
single, foundational text, like the Bible or the Quran.
Its ancient caste hierarchy perpetuated divisions and did not translate
easily into the unifying slogans of modern mass politics.
In
an effort to overcome these internal fissures, the early Hindu
nationalists built a regimented anticolonial social movement in the
1920s, which later formed links with Italian and German fascism; the
main branch was known
as the RSS, from the Hindu words for “national organization of
volunteers.” In place of black shirts and armbands, they wore khaki
shorts and carried bamboo sticks. This association tainted them in the
decades that followed, especially after so many British
and Indian soldiers died fighting the Axis powers in World War II.
Another serious blow came in 1948, when a Hindu nationalist zealot
assassinated Mohandas Gandhi, modern India’s saintly father figure.
Afterward, Nehru, Gandhi’s political heir, suppressed
Hindu nationalist organizations and fostered his own countervailing
conception of India as a pluralist, secular state. Although he was a
Brahmin, Nehru was a passionate cosmopolitan who saw Hindu identity as
narrow and tribal. He wanted India to be defined
by its diversity, not by any one faith. It was an idea shaped in part
by his British education at Harrow, Cambridge and the Inns of Court in
London, and one shared by many of his peers. For decades after
independence, India’s ruling class was mostly a “thin
layer of brown Englishmen,” in the phrase of an Indian friend of mine
who heard it from his grandfather, a friend of Nehru’s. They were
patrician figures who rebelled successfully against the British but
absorbed many of their ideas about how the country should
be governed.
By
the 1990s, Nehru's Congress party had become almost synonymous with the
Indian state, but his tolerant, worldly vision was starting to fray.
The Hindu nationalist movement anointed the B.J..P. as its political
vehicle, and
the party slowly gained strength, fueled by perceptions of corruption
and entitlement in the secular political elite. In 1998, the B.J.P. was
able to sustain a majority coalition in India’s Parliament for the first
time. But in early 2002, bloody communal
riots broke out in the western state of Gujarat, reviving the party’s
old demons. It started when a train carrying some Hindu pilgrims caught
fire. Revenge mobs quickly formed. In the ensuing violence, more than a
thousand people were killed, most of them
Muslims, and there was widespread looting. Ramdev’s future friend
Narendra Modi was Gujarat’s chief minister at the time, and evidence
soon emerged suggesting that he and other top B.J.P. officials had
stoked the violence, or at least given a green light.
(A court-appointed investigation cleared Modi of wrongdoing in 2012,
but many scholars and analysts who have examined the evidence disagree.)
Many Indian Muslims still consider the riots a state-sanctioned pogrom,
and see Modi — who has never apologized for
his role — as a criminal. But even among Hindus, the B.J.P. suffered
from its reputation as a party led by Brahmins and other upper-caste
Hindus. It had trouble winning votes from Dalits (untouchables) and
others at the lower end of India’s caste hierarchy.
Ramdev
was just the kind of unifying figure the B.J.P. needed. At the time of
the Gujarat riots, he was emerging as a celebrity, crisscrossing India
to preside over mass yoga camps and pitch his home remedies. He tapped
into
a hunger for spirituality and health among India’s growing middle class
and quickly became a symbol of Hinduism at its most benign, a
ready-made package of rituals and foods that were fun, affordable and
good for you. As his fame spread, a stream of politicians
and celebrities made their way to Haridwar, eager to donate to his
cause and seek his endorsement; he was becoming what Indians call a
“vote bank.” In 2011, he embraced the nationwide anti-corruption
movement, led by the independent social activist Anna Hazare,
which swept India that year. In June, he started a hunger strike
against corruption, and 40,000 of his followers rallied in his support
in Delhi. The police showed up with tear gas, and in the ensuing melee,
Ramdev shed his saffron robes under a stage and
tried to escape disguised as an injured woman, only to be detained and
exposed on video, bushy beard and all. The Indian press mocked him for
days.
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But nothing seems to taint Ramdev for long. Three years later,
his reputation as a crusader against corruption — a frequent B.J.P.
talking point — made him even more valuable in the elections that swept
the Hindu nationalists
to power. He turned his yoga-camp meetings, which often had tens of
thousands of people in attendance, into unofficial rallies. Two weeks
before the elections started, he welcomed Modi onstage at a huge outdoor
gathering in New Delhi. “You’ll make other people
understand, won’t you?” Ramdev said to the microphone, as Modi sat next
to him, grinning. “You won’t sit at home, will you?” The audience
roared back: “No!”
Ramdev
founded a short-lived political party in 2010, and has since been
rumored to be weighing a political career himself. When I brought up the
question, he smilingly batted it away, saying that he’d become a
“nonpolitical
person” and that the triumph of the B.J.P. had obviated any need for
him to run for office. “Modi is an honest prime minister,” he told me.
“He is a visionary and a missionary. He will win the next term (in the
2019 elections). He will build a strong foundation
for India.”
But
the B.J.P.’s ambitions go well beyond 2019. Unlike the Congress party,
the B.J.P. doesn’t just want to govern; it wants to transform the
country, politically and culturally. The Indian state and its business
allies have become
increasingly enmeshed in Hindu religious education and promotion,
funding ashrams,
gurukuls
(where students apprentice themselves to a guru and study Sanskrit) and
priest education. Modi’s government has also helped empower figures
like Yogi Adityanath, a right-wing Hindu firebrand who has said he wants
to install statues of Hindu gods in every mosque, and who last year
became chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.
Many
Indian Muslims say they have begun to feel like strangers in their own
land. The B.J.P. has proposed a number of laws with a troublingly
sectarian cast. One of them would allow immigrants from nearby countries
who are Hindu,
Buddhist, Sikh or Christian to apply for citizenship but would
explicitly exclude Muslims. Even worse, some Muslims say, is the
government’s winking attitude toward communal violence. In 2015, a Hindu
mob in a village near Delhi beat a Muslim to death on suspicion
of having eaten beef. When one of the accused killers later died of an
unrelated illness, a B.J.P. politician attended his funeral; the coffin
was draped in the Indian flag. Episodes like this have multiplied since
Modi’s victory in 2014.
Ramdev’s success at
rebranding yoga — and popular Hinduism — may owe something to
the inspirational power of his oft-told life story. He was born to a
poor farm family in north-central India, probably in 1965 (he has always
been vague about his age) and given the name
Ram Kisan Yadav. As a child, he worked in the fields and suffered a
series of illnesses and accidents. When I met him in Haridwar, he showed
me a horizontal scar on his forehead, the legacy of a fall when he was 3
or 4. Later he fell into the village pond
and nearly drowned. After the illness that paralyzed the left side of
his face, other children mocked him for his squint. He read about yoga
in a book, he told me, and began practicing it in order to fortify his
weak body. As a teenager, he left home for a
gurukul.
The years that followed are curiously blank; Ramdev has said very
little about them, sometimes claiming he doesn’t remember. What is clear
is that in 1995 he became a monk and assumed his current name after a
revelation
he described to me like this: “No personal choice, no personal desires,
no wealth, no respect or disrespect. My whole skill, whole existence,
this whole existence for all.”
Ramdev started teaching yoga soon afterward. He also teamed up with Balkrishna, whom he met at a
gurukul,
and the two men began peddling their homemade herbal pills and unguents
from a modest clinic that would eventually grow into Patanjali. An
early breakthrough came in 2002, when a religious TV channel called
Aastha
offered to broadcast Ramdev’s yoga classes. He quickly became a star,
charming audiences with his mobile eyebrows, his giggles, his trademark
undulating stomach-muscle routine (a traditional asana adapted for TV
audiences).. At the time, relatively few Indians
practiced yoga, even as millions of Americans were doing sun
salutations and intoning their namastes. It was considered an austere
discipline linked to ancient texts, too complex and rigorous for
ordinary people. Ramdev changed that. He is a lower-caste Hindu
who speaks in a playful, down-to-earth language. He simplified the
breathing exercises and postures, making them accessible to anyone. Yet
he also urged his listeners to be proud of yoga, calling it a
quintessential expression of the wisdom contained in the
sacred Hindu texts.
This
narrative about yoga’s ancient roots has become a sacrament for Hindu
nationalists, and it is echoed in the West. But it is mostly myth, an
idealized origin story of the kind so many would-be nation-builders,
from ancient
Rome to the Zionists, have fostered about themselves. The oldest Hindu
scriptures contain almost no mention of physical postures. Even the Yoga
Sutras, the so-called bible of yoga, include only a few short verses
suggesting comfortable postures for sitting.
Many of the postures practiced in yoga today appear to have emerged in
the 19th and early 20th centuries. Dozens of modern ashtanga yoga
postures are similar or identical to those found in a gymnastic routine
introduced to India by the British in the first
decades of the 20th century and originally developed by a Danish
fitness instructor named Niels Bukh, who later became notorious for his
pro-Nazi sympathies. Bukh, needless to say, has been conveniently
forgotten by both Indians and the yoga-loving celebrities
of Hollywood.
Yoga
is only half of Ramdev’s work. He and Balkrishna also use their
television empire to tout the healing virtues of Patanjali’s ayurvedic
medicines and health foods, rooted in the supposedly curative powers of
herbal and mineral
compounds. Western scientists view ayurveda (the “science of life”)
with skepticism, and studies have found that some ayurvedic products
contain toxic levels of heavy metals, usually from soil or ash, in the
mix. But in India they have become a booming business,
thanks in part to Ramdev's marketing efforts. Balkrishna gave me a tour
of Patanjali’s medical research institute, in a gleaming new building
that was inaugurated last year by Modi himself (“Swami Ramdev’s herbs
help you overcome all problems,” the prime minister
told the crowds gathered for the event).
If
Ramdev is Patanjali’s flamboyant mascot, Balkrishna is his foil, a
number-crunching introvert with buckteeth and a high, soft voice. He led
me upstairs to a laboratory where white-coated technicians were drying
masses of swampy
green spirulina, a form of algae, to be packed into pills. “It is high
in protein and vitamins,” one of the men told me. In his spare time,
Balkrishna said, he wanders the forests of the Himalayas looking for
medicinal herbs. Some can be found growing in a
garden behind the research center, adjoining a Disney-style religious
theme park, with life-size sculpted figures enacting scenes from the
Vedas inside man-made caves.
It
looked like Hindu kitsch to me. But for Ramdev and Balkrishna, all this
herbal wisdom is serious business. When it comes to marketing against
foreign competitors, they wield their holiness like a club. One
Patanjali ad runs:
“As East India Company plundered our country for 200 years likewise
these multinationals are exploiting our country by selling their harmful
and dangerous chemical products. Beware!” Ramdev’s competitors have
sued Patanjali repeatedly, but the slurs persist.
The swadeshi
campaign has served Ramdev very well. Economic nationalism is not just
an effective sales pitch; it has also allowed Ramdev to neatly sidestep
attacks on his own business practices.
Those attacks began as early as 2005, when a quarter of Patanjali’s
workers went on strike, claiming they’d been underpaid. Ramdev and
Balkrishna promptly fired them, but some of the workers kept samples of
the firm’s medicines and said they contained unlisted
ingredients including crushed human skulls (presumably residue from
soil or ash). A government lab test found human and animal DNA. In
response, Ramdev accused “powerful interests” of tampering with the
samples. (A later test of new samples found nothing amiss.)
His fans came to his defense, as did politicians in the B.J.P.
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Over
the years, this way of fending off criticism has become a pattern;
nonetheless, Patanjali has faced at least half a dozen legal actions
over its products. In October 2016, the food and drug administration of
Haryana State
found Patanjali’s cow ghee (clarified butter) to be “substandard and
unsafe.” Last April, the Indian military stopped selling a popular
Patanjali juice to soldiers after a government agency tested samples and
found them “unfit for consumption.” (Patanjali
countered that the juice was medicine and thus the wrong test had been
performed.) In the banned biography of Ramdev published last year, the
journalist Priyanka Pathak-Narain wrote that Patanjali’s cow ghee —
advertised as the purest on the market — was made
from white butter sourced from hundreds of thousands of small
producers, blending cow, buffalo and goat milk. In India, where pure
ghee is required for religious purposes, such things matter.
Some
former employees say Ramdev is guilty of more than safety violations.
One former high-level executive at Patanjali, who worked at the company
for several years, spoke to me on condition of anonymity, saying he
feared retaliation.
When I asked him why he left, he said of Ramdev: “Because he’s a
crook.. Because he’s a hypocrite.” He rattled off a sheaf of shocking
claims about fraud and employee abuse. (These have been written about in
the Indian press, but none appear to have been substantiated
in court.) One story involved Ramdev’s brother, Ram Bharat, who was
arrested in 2013 and accused of kidnapping and imprisoning a worker
suspected of theft (the charges were later dropped). Another former
Patanjali executive told me similar stories and added
that he began receiving threatening phone calls after he refused to
facilitate what he saw as kickback schemes. He complained to Balkrishna,
he said, but the calls continued and — feeling his life might be in
danger — he resigned. A Patanjali spokesman categorically
denied that any of these events took place.
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Despite
his popularity, Ramdev has long been trailed by even darker
speculations, centered on the deaths of two close associates. In 2007,
Ramdev’s own guru, a man named Shankar Dev, disappeared without a trace
after falling
into poverty and illness, and questions were raised about Ramdev’s
neglect of him. (Because Dev initiated Ramdev into monkhood, Ramdev
would have been expected to treat him like a parent.) In 2010, Rajeev
Dixit, one of Ramdev’s closest advisers, who taught
him about swadeshi
economics and helped make Patanjali a national brand, died suddenly.
Some of his friends believe that Ramdev resented Dixit’s own rising
celebrity, and they publicly speculated about foul play. But cardiac
arrest was cited as the cause of death, and Ramdev has dismissed
efforts to implicate him as a conspiracy by his political enemies. When I
asked him about this and other insinuations, he cast them all aside
with a smile and a wave of his hand. “It’s not true,”
he told me. “I am a very simple and humble and compassionate person.”
For
Ramdev’s critics, the skeletons in his closet are tied to a broader
concern that his political value to the B.J.P. may have placed him above
the law. I heard wealthy businesspeople in Delhi speak of him with
audible fear
in their voices, as if he could damage them at will. One thing is
certain: Ramdev has received extraordinary favors from the Indian
government since Modi was elected. Soon after the 2014 election,
B.J.P.-led state governments across India began facilitating
steep discounts on land purchases for Patanjali. There is some
precedent for nonprofits or religious organizations to receive such
favors, but the deals Patanjali got were very unusual. In the largest of
these deals, Patanjali was given a 1,200-acre parcel
of land in the eastern state of Assam at no cost. According to state
legislature documents I was shown by a local academic, the deal was made
by an agency controlled by the Bodoland People’s Front, a party aligned
with the B.J.P. Last year a Reuters investigation
documented several discounted land sales and leases in three other
Indian states that saved the company a total of $46 million. Critics say
these deals were partly payback for the boost Ramdev provided to the
B.J.P. in the elections. But by spreading Patanjali’s
presence into outlying areas where it needed support, the party was
also sowing the seeds of future electoral victories.
The state of
Assam is about two and a half hours east of Delhi by plane, a sprawling
strip of lush jungle and floodplain squeezed between the mountain
kingdom of Bhutan to the north and watery Bangladesh to the south.
Urbane Indians speak of Assam as a frontier zone, known
for its wild rhinos and tigers, its indigenous “tribal” populations and
its history of insurgencies. Distrust of the central government runs
deep, thanks to a long history of neglect and exploitation of Assam’s
rich natural resources — rubber, silk, timber,
tea and crude oil. There is also widespread resentment of the
Bangladeshi refugees, many of them Muslim, who have fled across the
border in recent decades. For the B.J.P. and its allies, Assam seemed
fertile ground for Hindutva, or Hindu ideology.
Not
long after the party’s 2014 victory, Patanjali secured two large tracts
in Assam and began work on a vast production facility. I reached the
plant after a bumpy eight-hour journey through endless tea plantations
and was greeted
by the site manager, an ebullient man with bushy eyebrows named S.B.
Singh.. His newly built office was empty apart from a large picture of
Ramdev on the wall. Through the windows we could see earth-moving
machines and construction crews and big piles of muddy,
ocher-hued soil.
“There
was jungle where we’re sitting,” Singh told me. “Elephants.” Patanjali
got the factory up and running in only 132 days, he told me, razing the
jungle and clearing out a total of 88 elephants before building a
complex of
warehouses on the 155-acre site. (The elephants were guided gently to a
patch of forest nearby, Singh told me.) He unleashed a blizzard of
statistics — 4,000 workers, 1.2 million bags of cement, a 20-person
management team — his eyes sparkling with pride at
the achievement. The plant remained unfinished and was still running at
partial capacity. But already hundreds of workers were busy making
cookies and cosmetics. Thousands more were being trained, and not just
in job skills.
“We
are mentally conditioning them,” Singh said. Patanjali ran more than
380 workshops for prospective employees, where it taught a “value
system.” Assam’s people, he explained, had “bad habits,” including
eating nonvegetarian
food and a lack of proper respect for the nation. “They’ve been
listening to corrupt politics from corrupt people for too long,” he
said. “We take what our sages said thousands of years ago and put it to
use. We didn’t invent it. We took what’s available in
our scriptures and put it in a modern format.” In other words, they
inculcate Hindutva.
Singh
took me on a tour of the production complex in an electric golf cart.
After admiring the cookie plant and its 300-foot oven, we drove across a
deliciously smooth, median-free stretch of pavement that resembled a
runway.
In fact, it is a runway, built in consultation with the Indian Air
Force so that jet fighters can take off and land on it, Singh told me.
“We will dedicate this to the nation in case there is need for an extra
airstrip,” he said, and then added with a knowing
look, “We are near China.” Patanjali seems almost to view itself as an
extension of the state — or rather, an illustration of what has become a
“state-temple-corporate complex,” in the apt phrase of the Indian
author Meera Nanda.
Patanjali’s
work in Assam has benefited from longer-term efforts by the RSS.
Founded in 1925, the group was briefly banned several times in the wake
of communal riots, most recently in 1992.. It periodically went
underground,
doing grass-roots organizing and forming dozens of affiliate
organizations that often hide their links with the RSS. Most of the
B.J.P.’s top leaders, including Modi, emerged from the RSS and profess
loyalty to it. Yet for all its vast influence, there is
something curiously slippery about the RSS. Its ideologues insist that
it is larger than Hinduism or any single religion, and they speak of a
mystical connection with the Indian subcontinent and the saffron flag,
the group’s symbol. They aspire to change India
at both the collective and the individual level. “It is a man-making
mission,” I was told by Shiv Shakti Bakshi, an RSS veteran who now runs
the B.J.P.’s English-language publications. “To make a man who can work
for the society, a selfless worker for the
society.” This focus on personal change meshes perfectly with Ramdev’s
promotion of physical fitness and health, and Bakshi spoke about the
guru in glowing terms. “His messages are taken seriously by people,” he
said.. “In elections, opinion building is important.”
The
RSS has become more visible since Modi’s 2014 victory. The group and
its affiliates have built hundreds of schools and job-training centers
in Assam and other northeastern states in recent years. I visited
several and saw
unmistakable signs of the RSS ideological program. At one school, young
children — some of whom had been raised Christian — recited Hindu
prayers and sang songs to Lord Ram before starting their lessons, which
include Sanskrit instruction.
All
this hard indoctrination work has paid off. In 2016, the B.J.P. won
control of Assam’s state government in legislative elections. And in
March of this year, the party won stunning electoral upsets in two
adjacent northeastern
states, where leftist parties had dominated for decades. There was talk
of a “saffron wave” that might spread to the south Indian regions,
including Communist-dominated Kerala, that have long resisted the
advance of Hindu nationalism. Many Indian political
analysts said the RSS’s grass-roots work was essential to the recent
electoral victories. But one RSS volunteer in Assam, a construction
contractor, told me Ramdev’s presence and his yoga promotion had been
very influential, too. The contractor said he'd helped
to arrange the purchase of cement and other supplies for the new Assam
factory site I toured. But eventually he soured on Patanjali, which he
saw as too focused on the bottom line. “Even we are not happy with the
way the government helps Ramdev so much,” the
contractor told me.
The
latest wave of B.J.P. victories has been attended by angry criticism of
the way the party feeds communal resentments, and Ramdev has not been
spared. Assam’s B.J.P.-led state government is compiling a citizenship
registry
that could cause millions of residents, mostly Muslims, to be declared
stateless and expelled, in an eerie echo of the disfranchisement that
preceded the mass murder of Rohingya people in nearby Myanmar. One
Assamese university professor, who asked not to
be named because he feared for his safety, told me that Ramdev had
abetted the RSS’s efforts to “question all other religions here,
anything non-Hindu.” He also said Patanjali — emboldened by its ties to
the Modi government — had run roughshod over laws regulating
the harvest of medicinal plants.
The same qualities
that have fueled Patanjali’s meteoric rise — its evangelistic fervor,
its dependence on Ramdev’s popularity and political connections — have
also made it vulnerable.
A surprising number of employees told me they saw the company as a
high-wire act that might not last. “Conceptually, it’s still not an
organization,” Singh, the manager of the new plant in Assam, told me.
“It’s an ashram, on a large scale. And what happens
on an ashram? What the guru says, you do.” Patanjali’s sales have grown
with extraordinary speed, and Singh told me it worried him. “When you
stretch something, a vacuum opens up in the middle,” he said, pulling
his hands apart as if tearing a lump of pizza
dough. In Haridwar, one young employee named Prashad told me he’d been
so inspired by Ramdev that he left his corporate job and took a huge pay
cut to join Patanjali. But now he worried about the company’s future.
“I don’t see it — how they’d continue paying
low salaries and maintain quality,” he said. He added that he would
leave the company when he married and needed more income.
Retention
has been a persistent problem for Ramdev. Applicants flock to the
company, despite the fact that Patanjali reportedly pays 25 to 50
percent less than its competitors. Many leave after a year or less, I
was told by executives
at Patanjali and other companies. “Autonomy is very low,” said one
executive at a competing company who asked not to be named, saying (like
many other people I spoke to) that he feared retaliation. “Ramdev is
very hands-on. There’s no doubt who’s in charge.
He’s a micromanager.” Behind his laughing public persona, Ramdev is
said by some to be an autocratic boss, capable of lashing out furiously
when he’s thwarted.
I
got a glimpse of Ramdev’s ashram-style management at Haridwar, where he
allowed me to observe him one afternoon. On the second floor of the
company’s main corporate office, the hallway was clogged with followers
who had come
for a glimpse of the guru. One group told me they had come all the way
from Tamil Nadu, in the far south. Eventually one of Ramdev’s handlers
escorted me past the guards and into a wood-paneled office, and there
was Ramdev, a splash of saffron color among
button-down oxford shirts and gray flannel pants. He was sitting
languidly on a couch, a wooden sandal dangling from his toe,
interviewing candidates for jobs in sales and marketing. The applicants
seemed as much in awe of Ramdev as the followers outside:
as they entered, each of them touched Ramdev’s feet reverently, then
sat down. He asked them to say what they could contribute to Patanjali. A
senior executive sat nearby taking notes, but Ramdev presided over the
interview like a king on a throne. He is involved
in even the smallest details: decisions about hiring, ads and product
development. If anything were to puncture his aura — some scandal worse
than those he has weathered in the past — it’s hard to imagine that
Patanjali would last a day.
Image
Ramdev
would not be the first godman to crash and burn. At least a half-dozen
other powerful gurus have been arrested and charged with serious crimes
in the past 20 years. The most recent and perhaps the most flamboyant
was Gurmeet
Ram Rahim Singh, a potbellied and chubby-cheeked figure who cast
himself as a superhero in several bizarre self-made action movies with
titles like “MSG: Messenger of God.” Singh, who claimed 60 million
followers around the world, was convicted of rape last
August and sentenced to 20 years in prison. (He has also been formally
accused of castrating about 400 of his disciples, a charge he denies.)
After the verdict was issued, his followers rioted, smashing cars,
setting fire to buildings and attacking police
officers; at least 38 people were killed and more than 250 injured.
But
Ramdev is bigger and better protected than his predecessors. Patanjali
has vastly expanded the market for ayurvedic products, and in late 2014
Modi created an entire new government ministry to promote yoga and
ayurveda, elevating
what had been an obscure government office. Ramdev has made himself a
symbol of Indian economic independence, and no one wants to question
that, not even his enemies. One Indian C.E.O. who has accused Patanjali
of false advertising told me he was grateful
to Ramdev — despite his many sins — for attracting a new customer base
in ways that benefited everyone. “The worst thing for us would be if he
implodes — with godmen you never know,” he said. “That would impact the
whole ayurvedic market.”
Ramdev
appears to have a second layer of insurance: The clouds that hang over
him also hang over his political patrons. Modi is regarded by much of
the secular elite as a criminal because of his supposed role in the 2002
Gujarat
riots. His close ally Amit Shah, the leader of the B.J.P. and by most
accounts the second-most-powerful man in India, was arrested in 2010 and
charged with arranging the murder of an underworld couple in police
custody and making it look as if they were killed
during a shootout. The case was ultimately dropped, but suspicions
about Shah’s role linger, fueled by a recent series of investigative
stories in the Indian press. Modi and Shah respond to their accusers in
exactly the same way Ramdev does, by lambasting
the secular elite. Their shared feelings of unjust persecution appear
to thicken their bond with Ramdev. And they see no need to change their
stance; by all available measures, the Indian public is as supportive of
Ramdev as ever. In early May, a widely watched
business survey reported that Patanjali was the most trusted brand in
the country, beating about 1,000 other companies in its sector,
including multinationals.
If
the Modi government gets its way, Ramdev’s star will rise even higher.
At the Chhatrasal stadium event in February, Amit Shah told the crowd
that the B.J.P. wanted Ramdev to join them in reforming the Indian
educational system.
One of the party’s new priorities is an ambitious effort to rewrite
Indian school textbooks to assert Hindu primacy. Mahesh Sharma, India’s
culture minister and an avowed follower of the RSS, has said he hopes to
rewrite the conventional narrative about India
as a multicultural tapestry, and to inculcate the belief that the
ancient Hindu scriptures are historical facts, not legends.
“There
is a lot of work to be done in education,” Shah said on the stadium
floor, just after the premiere of Ramdev’s biopic. “Because of our
saints and our heroes — all this needs to be brought into our
educational system.”
When
his turn came to speak, Ramdev walked to the lectern, smiling
graciously at the gaggle of B.J.P. luminaries onstage. He pledged his
support to Modi and Shah, and their efforts to transform India. “If the
first 50 years of
my life were a struggle,” he said, “my next 50 years I dedicate my time
and energy to the cultural and spiritual education of the country, to
bring our country the great knowledge of the Vedas.” He went on: “We
will see an Indian education policy in this country
instead of the education policy given us by Lord Macaulay.” Before
stepping down, he pumped his fist once again in a chant of “India my
motherland is great.” The crowd roared.
Robert F. Worth is a contributing writer for the magazine. His book on
the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, “A Rage for Order,” won the 2017
Lionel Gelber Prize. He last wrote for the magazine about the secretary
of defense,
Jim Mattis.
