Power of the Middle Indian

Baba Ramdev has energised India's small towns into vocally demanding equality of opportunity with the metropolitan elite: It's a genie that won't go back into the bottle

Television has changed the way we live, even think: Now religion and spirituality too are conditioned by what preachers declaim on the audio-visual media. In the US, TV evangelists spawned the emergence of the Religious Right, which supplanted the erstwhile Moral Majority. Both were conservative, suspicious of left/liberal support for gay rights or abortion, committed to upholding family values and broadly Republican in their political preference. As an industry, TV evangelism boomed during the late 1980s and 1990s, although the reported misdemeanours of some celebrity preachers have eroded the popularity of this genre.

Social or political reform, however, was not prominent on their agenda. They focussed on moral issues with faith healing as the main crowd puller. Christian preachers, mostly foreigners, have sought to replicate this model in India, particularly in the southern States. They have in turn influenced many Hindu cult leaders as well, who hold huge camps across the country to sermonise and promote Munnabhai-type cures for ailments. The rise of TV gurus, who appear regularly on various 24/7 religious channels that have mushroomed, has significantly altered not just thought processes but also impacted people’s lifestyles.

It is on the crest of India’s massive pravachan industry that Baba Ramdev holds sway over a significant section. Unlike many of his compatriots, the muscular Haryanvi swami is not essentially a philosopher. He is a doer more than a thinker, delivering crisp messages on the applicability of religious texts to everyday life. Baba Ramdev’s appeal derives from his mastery over Yoga, which he popularises as a panacea for almost every illness. He claims he can cure cancer and AIDS too with his unique formula that entails practice of Yoga alongside a special diet whose ingredients too his Patanjali group has to provide. In less than a decade, the Patanjali Yogashram has built a huge network of outlets for its organic food products and beverages that are prescribed by ayurvedic practitioners stationed at these outlets.

Meanwhile the Baba’s popularity has surged phenomenally, thanks to his early morning yoga expositions on TV. A talkative man whom BJP president Nitin Gadkari somewhat cheekily called the “rock star of yoga”, the Baba expounds on various domestic and international issues. He promotes restructuring of India’s educational and agricultural system with simplistic but appealing notions like technical courses being taught in the mother tongue or organic farming with drip irrigation. The semi-urban (small town) Indian middle class, left out of the zooming growth curve of the English-speaking, West-oriented metropolitan elite, eagerly laps up these “solutions”.

Here lies the fundamental difference between Baba Ramdev and the rest of his tribe. The others, many of them early movers in the TV race like Morari Bapu, Asaram Bapu, Sudhanshu Maharaj, Ma Anandamoyee, Mata Amritanandamayi, focus on the individual. They sermonise on morality, healthy lifestyle, relevance of religion in today’s material world, meditation and so on, aimed at providing salvation to the individual, Sri Sri Ravishankar branched out to build his own model, part-individual, part-collective by organising yoga-cum-meditation camps of diverse sizes to promote what he named the Art of Living. An engaging speaker, Sri Sri’s appeal too grew rapidly and his command over the English language enabled him to spread his message globally.

It is difficult to say why and exactly when Baba Ramdev forayed out of conventional models of the yoga-pravachan industry to build his unique brand of socially relevant sermonising. His declared agenda has very little to do with yoga or spirituality except in the remote sense of using these instruments to build a healthier nation and purify human beings both internally and externally. Probably, Ramdev himself has not yet figured out a clear-cut road map. But the way people have responded to his anti-corruption message must be giving him ideas on how to expand his influence beyond that of a yoga preacher.

He launched a nationwide movement one year ago, calling it Bharat Swabhiman Yatra to trudge across 100,000 km in a bid to rouse people out of their inertia on nation-building. The move invited scepticism; his detractors said that the ambitious Baba was planning to encash his mass appeal to launch himself in politics. Indeed he has contradicted himself on occasion, first saying he would launch a political party and contest elections but later retracting to insist he has no political ambitions. Possibly the current anti-politician mood among the middle class has made him wary.

Runaway corruption in the UPA Government, particularly the staggering estimates of loss to the exchequer in the 2G Spectrum scam, which came to light in a big way earlier this year, created the ideal ground for non-political freelancers, some with personal agendas. Baba Ramdev had not seriously politicised his appeal till Anna Hazare’s agitation for enactment of a Lok Pal Bill caught the nation’s imagination. Although it was the Baba’s financial clout and manpower reserves that helped Anna’s cohorts galvanise young people across the country, he was shrewdly sidelined by the urbane core group, which had no time for saffron-robed swamijis.

Anna Hazare may have inspired large sections of the metropolitan chatterati and glitterati into expressing sudden concern over the culture of corruption (from which they have significantly benefited), but the Jantar-Mantar protest left the burgeoning Indian small towns untouched. That is the vast reservoir which Ramdev is hoping to mobilise. This is not to suggest that the Yoga guru lacks support in the metros, but his followers are drawn mainly from the non-English speaking lower middle class who are in reality the biggest sufferers from the cancer of corruption. They emotionally supported Anna Hazare’s drive to install a tough anti-corruption regime through the institution of Lok Pal, but neither did they understand the legal intricacies that involves, nor did they seriously believe that a Lok Pal alone would lead to the collapse of the edifice of venality.

Hence the full-throated demand for “systemic change”. Ramdev is selling the big picture as opposed to the Anna Hazare party’s narrow-focussed campaign. The Baba’s slogans are simple and seem to be quite the panacea: Get back Rs 400 lakh crore of black money stashed abroad, hang those found guilty of corruption, drastically amend the political system to bring about a Presidential form of Government, teach engineering and medicine in the mother tongue to unleash the latent talent of Middle India.

To the seasoned (or cynical) observer this is a mere wish list, easier propagated than done. Getting back money from tax havens is an arduous, complex job that even the powerful US Administration has not succeeded in doing. Besides, much of the illicit money stashed abroad must have been taken out of foreign banks and brought to India through hawala transactions. But it is not concrete accomplishment that will determine the Baba’s growth trajectory; it is faith and hope. It is the dream that Middle India would like to hang on to. It is the belief that a missionary crusader will ensure equal opportunities to Middle India’s children and help brighten their futures, deliver them from the domination of the metropolitan elite that is propelling Baba’s campaign. May be the dream will get betrayed. On the other hand, may be some good will come out of it.

But whatever happens, Middle India has served notice on the ruling elite: They can no longer be ignored or deprived of the opportunities their urban counterparts have grabbed for themselves over the last 64 years.