|

Surrounded by people in suits, the woman decked in an orange sari and tube-top blouse with her hair in a large bun stood out. Several gold chains hung around her neck while a large golden maang tikka rested on her forehead. As she sat behind a podium in City Hall in Newark, New Jersey, along with Mayor Ras J. Baraka and other city officials, her arm showed a large tattoo of a man’s smiling face. The woman, Vijayapriya Nithyananda, was there for the signing of a “sister city agreement” between Newark and her country, the United States of Kailasa.

If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s not because you’re bad at geography. The United States of Kailasa is not a country in the conventional sense — it has no legal recognition and there isn’t much evidence to suggest it physically exists. However, rumors suggest it is an island off Ecuador in South America.

But representatives of Kailasa — the brainchild of Nithyananda, an Indian cult leader with a non-bailable arrest warrant against him — have been jetting across the globe on diplomatic missions. They’ve signed sister city agreements with 30 U.S. cities and have met with diplomats from several countries, including the United Arab Emirates. They’ve attended United Nations meetings and made speeches about their nation and its mysterious leader.

Nithyananda and Kailasa have now become somewhat of a running joke. At first glance, the sister city scam and fake Hindu nation racket appear to speak to the ignorance or naivete of the West. But the grim reality of his organization, along with its mostly female victims, tells a far more insidious story.

“Kailasa is the first sovereign state for Hindus established by the supreme pontiff of Hinduism, Nithyananda Paramashivam, who is reviving the enlightened Hindu civilization,” Vijaypriya said matter-of-factly at a United Nations meeting in Geneva, Switzerland in February. To her and many others, Nithyananda is the embodiment of the Hindu god Shiva, a living messiah. But to ex-devotees, Nithyananda is a cult leader. A self-proclaimed godman, Nithyananda amassed wealth and hundreds of thousands of followers across the world over nearly two decades.

Born Rajashekaran in the late 1970s in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Nithyananda says he had his first divine experience when he was around 10 years old, meditating on Arunachala Hill, near the holy town of Tiruvannamalai. “After my guru’s demise, I left my village when I was 17 and wandered for eight years before settling in Bangalore,” he said in a 2012 interview. He shot to fame in his early 20s as a healer, capable of curing people of any ill, from depression to cancer. In 2003, he established his ashram, Nithyananda Dhyanapeetham, in a sprawling plot in the quiet town of Bidadi, Karnataka.

His discourses — many of which were in English — combined traditional Indian spirituality and yoga with modern-day self-help guidance. Soon, the image of Nithyananda — dressed in saffron robes with his wavy shoulder-length black hair and an ever-smiling countenance — was everywhere. He spoke animatedly, like an experienced teacher explaining a difficult concept. “His deep knowledge of the ancient sciences and philosophies of Hinduism, as described in the scriptures of Hinduism, felt like a breath of fresh air,” Vijayapriya tweeted, describing her impressions of Nithyananda’s videos when she first saw them.

“Me is only sitting as me in you. These two is only talking to each other,” Nithyananda says in one popular sermon. In another video, he explains why Einstein’s theory of relativity is wrong.

Even critics described his persona as charismatic. As a result, Nithyananda’s popularity soared. By 2010, his organization had opened meditation centers and ashrams in dozens of cities, including Los Angeles and Seattle in the U.S. Nithyananda published several books, including Living Enlightenment: the Gospel of Paramahamsa Nithyananda. Several prominent celebrities and politicians, including the Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi, were meeting with him.

But in 2010, a sex tape turned Nithyananda’s world upside down. In the video, the smiling guru lies on a bed and is sexually intimate with a woman in a white sari. Most followers view religious gurus, who often declare their celibacy, as above physical needs. As news channels aired the scandalous footage, there was outrage. A former female devotee, not the one in the video, who had planted the hidden camera, accused Nithyananda of raping her repeatedly over five years. Nithyananda denied the allegations, saying that he was impotent and that the video was morphed. Indian police arrested him, and he spent more than 50 days in prison in Ramanagara, Karnataka before he got out on bail. The victim, Arathi Rao, an engineer and former Michigan resident, came out publicly with her allegations in 2012, along with other former devotees.

Many thought that would be the end of Nithyananda. But that didn’t happen. That same year, in 2012, a magazine listed him as one of the 100 most spiritually influential living people, alongside the likes of Dalai Lama, Oprah Winfrey, and Desmond Tutu. The pontiff of the Madurai Adheenam — a more than 1,000-year-old Hindu mutt, or monastery, in southern India — appointed Nithyananda as his successor, even as he was mired in scandal. It took months before the monastery removed him from his position.

Still, Nithyananda’s followers remained largely undeterred, a common pattern for the disciples of many gurus accused of crimes. Followers of guru Asaram Bapu — guilty of raping a teenager — conduct programs in his honor even as he serves his life sentence. Devotees of self-proclaimed godman Gurmeet Ram Rahim, who has been convicted of rape and murder, offer prayers outside his jail.

“Devotees will continue their faith despite the critique. It almost can work to create the guru as a martyr, creating substance behind a narrative that the guru is persecuted and is defending a righteous cause,” said Amanda Lucia, professor of religious studies at the University of California, Riverside. In a sense, the controversies can sometimes re-energize the guru’s followers, and it worked in Nithyananda’s case, too.

But controversies continued to plague Nithyananda. In 2014, a 24-year-old woman died mysteriously in his ashram. The woman’s mother insists the ashram tortured and killed her daughter, while the ashram claims she had died of a cardiac arrest. The rape case against Nithyananda also began to gather steam. The noose was tightening and, in August 2018, his organization sent one of Nithyananda’s closest devotees, a Canadian woman named Sarah Landry, to Toronto to try to get political asylum for the guru in Canada.

Landry was the force behind Nithyananda’s social media presence, chronicling her spiritual journey online and urging others to join the mission. But, during a conversation with children enrolled in one of Nithyananda’s residential schools in India, she learned about the horrific abuse taking place. The ashram officials were starving the children, forcing them to beat one another and to fake spiritual powers.

“It was like what I thought my purpose in life, what I had based so much of my belief in, was shattering,” Landry said in a viral video she uploaded in 2019. She captioned it with a warning: “Please don’t fall into the same trap I did.”

Nithyananda’s empire came crashing down only in 2019, over accusations of rape and child abduction. Janardhana Sharma, a devotee, alleged that Nithyananda was keeping his two young daughters, minors, forcefully in his ashram in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The footage of the girls’ mother begging to get her daughters back outside the ashram gates gripped the nation, and police set out to arrest him. By then, Nithyananda had stopped making public appearances. When police arrived at his Ahmedabad ashram in November 2019, in response to complaints about the illegal confinement of children and to look for the two missing girls, the guru was nowhere to be found. He had already left the country.

Four years later, he continues to evade arrest. When Nithyananda surfaced in December 2019, it was to announce in a video that he had established a nation called Kailasa, dedicated to the “preservation, restoration, and revival of an enlightened culture and civilization based on authentic Hinduism.” He declared himself its supreme leader. In videos, sitting on his embellished throne depicting a 25-headed form of the Hindu god Shiva, he pontificates about Kailasa, a “cosmic” nation for Hindus, named after a Himalayan mountain that Hindus consider holy. He claims that ancient Hindu traditions are in danger and that “anti-Hindu elements” in India are persecuting him.

“I realized that [Nithyananda] was being persecuted for his efforts to revive authentic Hinduism along with gender equality, unite Hindus, and speak out against the centuries-long ethnocide and genocide of Hindus across the world,” tweeted Vijayapriya, when people asked her why she follows his gospel, despite the controversy that shrouds him.

“He is fighting back in a strategic way by clouding the truth,” said Lucia. He’s doing so by mobilizing the internet, she said, and by conducting outreach in global forums, “making inroads in surprising ways.”

Kailasa has a robust online presence, with accounts on several social media platforms that post almost daily, unleashing a carefully planned disinformation campaign. Kailasa’s website, for example, portrayed the sister city agreement with Newark as the United States recognizing the country of Kailasa. Kailasa shared photos and videos of its representatives posing with the mayor on social media as proof. But there was no mention of Newark declaring the agreement void just six days later. To a layperson who may not bother with fact-checking everything Kailasa puts online, the country seems real.

“It’s just a truly bizarre kind of thing,” said a spokesperson at Hindus for Human Rights, a nonprofit, who wished to remain anonymous out of concern of retribution from Nithyananda’s organization. “It’s like trying to claim some sort of authority, which just does not exist.”

In a video address in December 2020, Nithyananda, sitting on a throne with his hair piled up in dreadlocks on the top of his head — trying to look like depictions of the Hindu god Shiva — told viewers that his country was open to visitors and that they would have to reach Australia, from where Kailasa’s chartered flight service would take them to the country for a maximum three-day stay. Some believe that Kailasa is on an island off the coast of Ecuador, but authorities there deny this. “It was established much in the spirit of a country like the Sovereign Order of Malta, a borderless service-oriented nation,” Kailasa’s press office wrote. The Juggernaut reached out to Kailasa and one of its representatives but didn’t receive a response by the time of publication.

Many religious groups want to create a utopia — be it the Texas ranch established by the polygamous Mormon sect, The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or Indian cult leader Osho’s Rajneeshpuram in Oregon. Nithyananda’s vision was grander: a whole new country with a national anthem, flag, emblem, constitution, and currency (the Kailashan dollar). Anyone can sign up for citizenship by scanning a QR code. Kailasa also issues e-passports; the organization says it has received over 7 million applications.

“I haven’t seen anything that looks substantive to any of the claims that Kailasa actually exists,” added Lucia.

Nithyananda’s most loyal followers assume the role of Kailasa diplomats, representing the “country” at global forums. They have met with officials of several African nations and attended Diwali celebrations at the United Kingdom House of Lords in 2022 at the invitation of members of the Conservative Party.

Nithyananda and his team have been doing this type of outreach for years. The Hindus for Human Rights spokesman said Nithyananda’s group was part of the International Religious Freedom summit in 2021. They were also at the Parliament of World’s Religions, an interfaith conference in Toronto in 2018, he pointed out. The organization’s name was on flyers and boards as one of the sponsors.

“I did a double take when I saw that,” the spokesman added. “That was my first big red flag that this group is infiltrating all of these global spaces, political spaces.”

They’ve done so, the spokesman shared, by weaponizing and twisting language around social justice and minority rights. Nithyananda and his organization talk about a “Hindu holocaust” and the large-scale persecution of Hindus. They also call themselves an indigenous community.

“It’s coming from a broader playbook that the Hindu right is deploying both in India and globally,” he said. It’s dangerous, he added, because “it distracts from the instances where Hindu communities actually are persecuted. It totally delegitimizes any actual discussion of violence against the Hindu community.”

What’s also surprising, he said, is that none of the government officials or international groups seems to have done their homework before meeting with Kailasa members. The Juggernaut reached out to the city of Newark for comment but did not receive a response. While the agreements Kailasa signs or the statements it makes in UN meetings don’t carry any weight, they are nevertheless deeply concerning.

“It’s very frightening, honestly,” said Lucia. “It just spoke to me about how fragile our democracy really is, and how easily ideas and persons can come into positions of power.”

For the most part, onlookers have relegated Nithyananda, Kailasa, and his followers to comedy, his ludicrous lectures a perfect fodder for jokes. In a segment on The Daily Show, host Kal Penn jokes, “There must have been so many red flags —  the biggest one being that anyone wanted to be sister cities with Newark.” The comment sections of Nithyananda’s videos are full of sarcastic remarks. “I was heartbroken and crying for months after a breakup. First time I actually laughed in a long time,” one viewer wrote.

But the comedy can sometimes distract from the more sinister reality. “Let’s shift our focus a bit from the funny fake nation to the horrific coercive control,” said Landry, the former devotee, in a tweet. “Brainwashing fuels the crimes of this cult. These are not free women speaking their truth. They are controlled women under the delusion that their fraud ‘guru’ is Lord Shiva.”

While U.S. officials handle their embarrassment about being duped, Indian authorities are facing the more serious questions: how has a rape-accused fugitive managed to escape for so long? Meanwhile, victims are awaiting justice. The mother of the woman who died mysteriously in Nithyananda’s ashram has urged India’s Central Bureau of Investigation to take up the case. And the Sharma family is yet to be reunited with their two missing daughters, who are now in Kingston, Jamaica, according to court documents.

“Catch him, try him,” one writer implored Indian authorities in a recent editorial. “Nithyananda’s antics at the UN and Newark, however funny, are not the story here. That he is getting away is.”