Died of a heart attack, but devotees insist he will come back to life.
By Rajiv Theodore
NEW DELHI: Some gurus have eternal lives, they never die; are shelved in cryogenic chambers, reminiscent of scenes from Batman and Superman movies.
Recently, Ashutosh Maharaj, who was declared dead by doctors (after a cardiac attack on January 28-29) was kept in a deep freezer by zealous devotees in Punjab state who claim that far from being dead, the guru has elevated himself into another orbit which denotes the highest form of meditation called the Samadhi.
In fact, the devotees claim the Maharaj would come back to his followers once he finishes with this Samadhi. They insist that the guru is busy communicating with them ever since he went into this mother of all meditations. They say that the guru keeps reminding them to preserve his body till he returns amongst them after his journey to the icy Himalayas.
The devotees say that the guru is only but one of the many examples of godmen taking a sojourn with or without their physical bodies into the freezing recesses of the Himalayan mountains without clothes and emerging unscathed after the business of this extreme meditation is accomplished.
But, this current decision to keep the guru in a deep freezer borrowed from an NGO has not remained unchallenged.
The guru’s former driver had appealed to the court that the body was frozen by his followers because they wanted to partake of the huge wealth of the Ashram estimated at Rs 1500 crore. But this was shot down by the court. The Punjab and Haryana High Court said that since the guru died of a heart-attack and his death has been medically confirmed, it is up to the followers to take a call on how the body has to be kept or disposed.
Some say that if Ashutosh is declared dead before a successor is formally announced then the wealth would simply be transferred to a charitable trust. But the members of the organization argue that it would be their guru’s decision to announce a successor which would be done once he comes out of the Samadhi. The members did not allow son Dalip Jha, who came all the way from Bihar’s Madhubani district, to claim his father’s body and perform the last rites.
According to the followers, the guru is a sanyasi, an ascetic, whose life of celibacy did not allow him to marry at all. The Maharaj’s website has thanked the followers for their steadfastness in keeping their faith in such trying times while he undertakes his extreme journey. The website has till date not updated the status of their guru as dead.
When Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amrinder Singh and cabinet minister Manish Tiwari had condoled the death of the guru in an email statement, they had to retract the matter as his followers insisted that it was not death but a form of transcendental meditation.
This highly closed sect called the Divya Jyoti Jagriti Sansthan (DJJS) founded in 1983 when Punjab was in the throes of Sikh terrorism, was originally meant to dilute the adverse impact of terror among the people through his preaching of peace. The DJJS came under direct line of fire of the Sikh community after the guru allegedly spoke against the Guru Granth Sahib. Ever since then the guru had been accorded top security cover.
A posse of about 100 cops guard the 100-acre ‘Dera’. The sect has several spiritual centers within and outside India.
Recently, another controversy erupted, also connected with a spiritual saint, Mata Amritanandamayi whose order is in the middle of a row after a former disciple, an Australian, fired severe allegations of sexual exploitation and cruelty against the institution and its leader in a book titled ‘’Holy hell: A Memoir of Faith, Devotion and Pure Madness. ‘’