These godmen are clever self-styled crooks and thieves: A Jodhpur court convicted self-styled godman Asaram on Wednesday, 25th April 2018 and sentenced him to life imprisonment for the rape of a teenage girl at his ashram in Manai village near Jodhpur in 2013. His son Narayan Sai is currently in jail for sexually assaulting a woman at one of Asaram’s ashrams between 2002 and 2005. Sai has also been accused of sexually abusing eight other girls, some of whom were his followers. Gurmeet Ram Rahim is another self-styled godman who had his followers dancing to his tunes, quite literally. Dera Sacha Sauda Chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh not only delivered religious sermons but also acted in films and gave performances on stage; he is also behind the bars for rapes, murders, money laundering.

A Chennai based godman Nithyananda’s face was plastered all over television screens when video clippings of him cropped up showing him supposedly engaging in sexual acts with a Tamil actress in March 2010. He had claimed then that he was only practising the shavasana, a yoga posture, at the time. He also claimed to be impotent and, therefore, incapable of intercourse. Shiv Murat Dwivedi alias Ichchadhari Sant Swami Bhimanand Ji Maharaj – Chitrakoot Wale allegedly amassed wealth to the tune of crores by allegedly running a sex racket. He is also accused of running a website for flesh trade. On February 25, 2010, he was held with two air hostesses on account of running prostitution ring for almost a decade in the national capital. On March 9 of the same year, MCOCA charges for flesh trade were slapped on him. He was seen in a video doing the ‘naagin dance’, seemingly under the influence of alcohol.

Self-styled godman Santosh Madhavan alias Swami Amrit Chaitanya was arrested in 2008 on charges of rape of minor girls as well as cheating an NRI woman. He was convicted by a Kerala court of misusing money from his followers as well as the rape of four minors. Premkumar alias Ravi alias Swami Premananda of Premananda Ashram, located in Tiruchirapally, Tamil Nadu, was accused of raping as many as 13 inmates and molesting two followers. He was also accused of killing Ravi, an engineer, in the ashram premises in 1994. He was sentenced to life by the Supreme Court in 2005. He passed away in February 2011 owing to ill health. He was also accused of rape by one of his former follower. According to reports, the police had found drugs, condoms and other contrabands when his ashrams were raided.

These and many more babas and matas have made divinity their business and preoccupation. Right from the Maharaj libel case (1862) through the manoeuvrings of Chandraswami and Dhirendra Brahmachari, to the present-day saga of Dera Sacha Sauda and Asaram Bapu, the list is eternal. Their ashrams are addas (den) for crime:  sex, drug trafficking, human trafficking, money laundering, politicking and all sorts of anarchy. The godmen are famous for multiple heinous and appalling criminal cases.

Modus operandi: The fact is the godmen have undaunted followers who are in irrational awe of them. The followers are mesmerised so much that they refuse to see the ’dark side’ of the godmen.  Majority of the followers are gullible, vulnerable and dim. This topic was very sensibly handled in the Bollywood movie named ‘’Oh My God’’. This brave and absorbing blend of satire, fable and fantasy brought out facts and attention to the misuse and commercialisation of religion by the godmen. Divinity has become a big industry in India and many other parts of world.

Godmen are supported by their inner circle people to loot their devotees cleverly from time to time. The devotees submit to the extortion or exploitation of godmen willingly. Today when contemporary India looks like a modern country with scientific institutions, and high-speed trains, expansive highways, modernised hospitals, IITs and IIMs the fact is that its social situation is reeking of medievalism, caste discrimination, religious obscurants, gender inequality and superstitions. Religion and superstition are hallmark of independent India. The godmen help politicians in their vote bank policy. A large portion of the ’educated’, ‘employed’ and ‘qualified’ population has been succumbed to the lure of an illusory world of godmen.

Is education enough? It is a question we need to ask ourselves whether education has adequately fulfilled its role. After all, the substantial following that godmen command is not from the illiterate masses, but also from the well-educated middle class that tends to celebrate the irrational in the name of culture. The media also plays a big role in advertising promoting and reinforcing irrationality and superstition in the society. The reading material available in almost all Indian languages is sated with accounts of the charismatic personae and spiritual qualities of godmen. Not only religious channels, but some secular channels telecast programmes advertising and showcasing the godmen’s virtues and achievements. From these popular representations, and patronage they seem to enjoy from the State, they derive considerable legitimacy, whereas, these godmen are in fact peddlers of faith.

Backing by rich followers: rich followers are the financial backbone of these clever babas and matas. The rich people who have everything materially, lack happiness and warmth and optimism. They get attracted to these conmen easily. The elusive godmen also act as a channel between politicians, bureaucrats and their rich followers, using their smart networking system to help all. The fact is that the deras and satsangs are great places for networking.

Innate need to belong to someone: Nevertheless, we all have a deep, innate need to belong to someone or something. It’s a sort of social craving in us for affiliation. We also need to matter. We want our lives to have a meaning and purpose. Nobody dreams of being one amongst millions; we all wish to have a unique identity and to know that our existence matters. We therefore desperately seek an anchor that has a magic wand to fulfil our desires. This is how we get exploited by fake Babas and Matas. It is fashion in India to get attached to a cult; it gives an identity of sorts. The half-baked gyan spurting by the Babas helps their devotees’ hopes looking brighter.

Art of hypnotism: These fake Godmen have great shrewdness and oratory and are able to secure the faith, fondness and belief of their followers with usual tricks of the trade. They are great at playing the collective psyche and hand out miracles and titbits of hope. The herd mentality of people works wonders for the godmen to accumulate followers. Superstitious beliefs and the deep need to find hope and happiness keep people attached to them.  These clever godmen mesmerize people in hope, fantasy just in a jiffy.  The conmen are clever enough to understand how to trick and collectively hypnotise masses into becoming followers. Sad, but people who lack purpose and a sense of direction, get hooked to the trick of the conmen.

Conclusion: Our social fabric is getting weaker and weaker; a large number of people are lonely, dejected and unhappy.  A lot of people in upper classes are in a big stress. They are desperately looking for an easy way to manage the stress. They often have a desperate itch to buy happiness with money. Some of the godmen start mixing drugs and get people addicted. People go euphoric, thinking they have found God. Some of these conmen are plain mafias. They have their retreats in their distant ashrams and get people to do stuff that will be photographed and get blackmailed. Our memory is short, we are kept busy one after other Ram Rahim, Asaram, Nityanand, Radhe maa episodes. At least for a decade, freeing India of the menace of fraud godmen seems a big challenge than cleaning up India through the ambitious Swachh Bharat Abhiyan!

It was a period in the Dutch Golden Age was (a period in the history of the Netherlands spanning the 17th century, in which Dutch trade, military and art were recognized among the most acclaimed in the world) during this period contract prices for some tulip bulbs reached extraordinarily high levels. It is mentioned that at a time, the prices shot higher than homes, and then dramatically collapsed. The expanding interest in tulips coincided with an especially prosperous period in the history of the United Provinces, which, by the 17th Century, dominated world trade and had become the richest country in Europe. As a result, not only upper-class citizens but also wealthy merchants and even middle-class artisans and tradesmen suddenly found that they had spare cash to spend on luxuries such as expensive tulip flowers.

Since then, tulip mania is used as a metaphor to describe an economic bubble. When people start investing in a particular asset in large quantities because of positive sentiments about it, the asset price pushes upward to very high levels. After reaching a peak, prices suffer a sharp fall due to a wide sell off, leaving the asset holders bankrupt. These assets are metaphorically called tulips in economics.

Virtual currency Bitcoin has officially become the largest bubble in history, bigger than the notorious tulip mania. According to analysts Howard Wang and Robert Wu from Convoy Investments, the bitcoin price has gone up over 17 times this year, 64 times over the last three years and superseded that of the Dutch tulip mania’s climb over the same time frame. Their asset bubble chart released a month ago, went viral after they showed that among all of the world’s most famous asset bubbles, only bitcoin is lagging the 17th-century tulip bulb mania. The analysts have updated the chart to show the price of the digital currency has more than doubled in just a month. So, as of now, bitcoin has won the global bubble race, ultimately having surpassed the “Tulips.”

Another example of economic bubble is the South Sea Bubble. It was created by a more complex set of circumstances than the Dutch Tulip mania, but has nonetheless gone down in history as another classic example of a financial bubble. The South Sea Company was formed in 1711, and was promised a monopoly by the British government on all trade with the Spanish colonies of South America. Expecting a repeat of the success of the East India Company which had a flourishing business with India, investors kept buying its shares like maniacs, resulting steep hike in price of the shares of the South Sea Company. And its directors circulated tall tales of unthinkable riches in the South Seas (present-day South America), shares of the company surged more than eight-fold in 1720, from £128 in January to £1050 in June, before collapsing in subsequent months and causing a steep downfall.

Economic bubbles burst suddenly because it is often difficult to observe basic values in real-life markets, bubbles are often conclusively identified only in retrospect after a sudden drop in price occurred. Such a drop is known as a crash or a bubble burst. Both the boom and the burst phases of the bubble are examples of a positive feed back mechanism. Prices in an economic bubble can fluctuate erratically, and become impossible to predict from supply as well as demand point of view.

The Dot-Com Bubble is an example of the 1990s. This bubble became bigger because of NASDAQ.  The introductions of the Internet generated a massive wave of speculation in new economy businesses, and as a result, hundreds of dot-com companies got floated. They got multi-billion dollar valuations as soon as they went public. The NASDAQ Composite which became home to most of these technology / dot-com companies, soared from a level of under 500 at the beginning of 1990 to a peak of over 5,000 in March 2000. The index crashed shortly subsequently, dipping nearly 80% by October 2002 and left triggering recession in US.  The Composite eventually reached a new high only in 2015, more than 15 years after its previous peak.

Similarly the Rhodium Bubble of 2008 saw prices of the rare chemical element increase from $500 per ounce in late 2006 to $9,500 per ounce in July 2008, before falling even more rapidly back to $1,000/oz in January 2009. Nobody is quite sure what sparked the buying rage, but it seems to have been a combination of demand in the American car industry, a bullish market in rare metals and at least one rogue speculator on Wall Street leading on the herd of investors. Likewise, the Uranium Bubble happened in 1970s. Uranium hit spot prices of around $110 a pound, but dropped down to below $20 pound in the 1990s, and this is where it stayed until 2005. A perception of future nuclear energy demand from emerging economies, reactor lifetime extensions in the West and low inventories of uranium led to a swift increase in prices from 2005 to 2007, causing a huge point in stock prices for uranium mining and exploration companies.

Conclusion: Typically during a phase of bubble, investors get hooked by a new idea or circumstance, a new innovation, new technology. Bubbles are also discomforting for the economics professionals. Buyer get swayed with the stories attached to asset, there are no guaranteed formulas to explain what causes bubbles to form, it’s just that buyers get very greedy of making profits. Some explanations can be psychological. Few thinkers point out that many bubbles have been stirred up not by stock markets but by governments. And, strangely some analysts think that some famous bubbles were not bubbles at all. People get carried away. They hear stories from their neighbours, friends, some relative getting rich and they invest in the stock at whatever price it may cost them. Greed has no limits and this is the reasons for creation of economic bubbles. A symptom of this herd mentality is called ‘’ me too’’ psychology; it’s very typical when investor displays his/her greed with bad timing.