In the Name of God

The swami who started as a hotel doorman and made crores with a temple, ashram and sex worker network of his own.

Dar dar ki maine khaak hai chhaani / Karta raha man ki manmaani / Sai tumne liya mujhe thhaam… / Thikana mera Sai charnon mein

(I’ve wandered around directionless / Doing whatever my heart desired / Sai, you’re the one who anchors my life / Now, I’ve come to rest at Sai’s feet)

Ichchadhari Swami Bhimanand Ji Maharaj Chitrakootwale sings a bhajan about his own life, his open hair littered with marigold petals, as an over-zealous MP of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Kirti Azad, clangs a pair of cymbals in spiritual support.

That was September 2008. Now it’s March 2010 and the swami still seems unweighed down by the burden of a wishlist too long, as he ambles through Delhi’s Saket Police Station unshackled in a loose white kurta-pyjama, hair neatly held back in a bun. He has been charged with running an organised crime—a prostitution racket—and it’s only now that the prescient plea of his bhajan begins to sink in. He’ll need all the sanctuary of sanctimony he can find. Soon, the 39-year-old emerges with a bio-degradable veggie bag on his head, only to be frisked off by cops.

It’s quite a life he’s led. Like the divinities of yore, his presence would prakat (manifest) itself in varied forms, depending on need and circumstance. To his girlfriends, he was simply Shiv Murat Dwivedi, the romantic. To his victims and clients, he was Shiv Murti, a man who indulged in prostitution, dacoity, murder attempts and was in and out of jails on charges of being a pimp, until he discovered safety in God. Thence, to his fellow Sai devotees, he was Swami Bhimanand, a holy man above suspicion. It was a guise that didn’t just shield him, it let him charge what DCP Dhaliwal calls a “criminally high rate of interest” as a moneylender; his followers would deal roughly with those who fell back on payment schedules. Plus, there was that little matter about foreign donations from Vegas; donations for a temple that helped his real estate business boom.

It was all done in Sai Baba’s name—except this time, the swami landed in jail, where a devout Sai bhakt police sub-inspector gave him hell for maligning the name of his revered saint of Shirdi.

The ascetics of Haridwar have spoken: they know of no such sant as ‘Ichchadhari’. Swami Bhimanand, they say, is more of “a trader than a spiritual guru”. But, cinema apart (think Sridevi in Nagin or Mystique in X-Men), a mere trader cannot transform himself at will, can he?

According to the police, he answered all his phone calls himself with ‘Om Sri Sai’ instead of the usual ‘Hello’. He would hear the caller out and then decide who was being sought—the pimp Shiv Murti or Sai Bhakt Swami Bhimanand. It was a cosy set-up, and all his alter-egos lived in harmony (none of that Karthik Calling Karthik stuff). The holy alter-ego wrote bhajans in praise of Sai Baba, while Shiv Murat Dwivedi’s girlfriends wrote him love letters. ‘Is money all you care for?’ asks a plaintive Pinky in a letter written on the letterhead of a Noida-based modelling agency. Maybe he can plead schizophrenia.

But the cops won’t let him get away. At an upscale Delhi market, on 25 February, he, an associate and some sex workers were arrested soliciting clients who turned out to be undercover police officers. The racket was being run from two-government allotted flats in South Delhi—one in RK Puram, and the other belonging to a public works gardner Ram Narayan in Mohammedpur, which Dwivedi had sublet.

All this, while over 100,000 naive followers saw little other than his holy guise. “We had no clue he was involved in such terrible crimes… our mothers and wives touched his feet,” fumes a livid Ajit Kumar, who once organised a satsang for Swami Bhimanand in Delhi, having come in contact with him at the Sai Baba temple on Lodhi Road. Says another bhakt, Rahul Hazarika, “He invited us to the Khanpur Mandir. We would have never gone if we knew. I can’t even imagine what all he was involved in.”

The police insist Shiv Murti used to run his affairs like a business venture. He didn’t trust anyone else apart from one or two men for logistics, and often accompanied his sex worker to the pick-up points himself. He took all bookings himself too, maintained a diary of their holidays, and was meticulous in his accounts—noting down such small details as condom expenses. But then, it was a big operation. He had over 50 girls working directly for him and had numbers for more than 500 others. The money was good, evidently. His net worth is placed at nearly Rs 60 crore. Not counting his family property, he owns a temple and ashram in Khanpur and three other properties in Delhi, besides property in Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh, where he was building a 200-bed hospital.

“I’m constructing the hospital because I felt bad when people from my village had to come to Delhi for treatment,” he says earnestly, failing though to explain his source of funds. If that wins no sympathy, he insists he was getting threats from the Congress to join it, hinting that the charges against him are politically motivated.

Dwivedi’s rags-to-saffron-to-jailrags story is well documented in Delhi and NCR police records. Arriving in Delhi in 1988, he landed himself a job as a security guard at Hotel Park Royal. Soon, he moved to a five-star in Agra. But he was an ambitious man, and he resurfaced as the manager of a Sai massage parlour in South Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar area that promised clients ‘happy endings’. It was here that Dwivedi made friends with another man with the surname Dwivedi, and his religious awakening began. This friend, a bhakt of the Sai Baba of Shirdi, put him in touch with other swamis and sants. By then, he already had quite a few girls on his contact list. But before he could venture into the cut-throat world of big time sex trafficking, the Delhi Police played spoilsport.

Dwivedi was arrested in 1997, the first of four arrests. The next came soon after; he was arrested for receiving stolen goods and on dacoity charges in Badarpur in 1998. He was getting too much heat in Delhi and moved operations to Noida. By then, he had a temple in Khanpur, and Shiv Murat Dwivedi was shed in favour of Ichchadhari Swami Bhimanand.

Despite his seemingly ingenious godly cover, it was here that Swami Bhimanand’s single minded obsession with prostitution begins to look foolish. In 2003, the Noida police laid a trap (identical to the one set up by the Delhi police on 25 February) by sending two decoy customers to strike a deal with Dwivedi. They arrested the phoney godman, his pimp and six sex workers.

But jail bars have never been able to contain the spirit of a true go-getter. Dwivedi was out and about soon after. He replaced his logistics guy Sanjay Mishra, who was arrested in 2003, with a former auto driver, Parveen Kumar. The girls were still educated girls—models, air hostesses and TV starlets living without parents—listed premium at Rs 20,000 per night (Rs 10,000 for two hours) on his site. For foreign air hostesses, like the British Airways girl arrested this time round, he charged Rs 25,000 to Rs 30,000.

His third tryst with the law in 2003 had him convinced he’d be out after paying a paltry fine even if arrested. Plus, he had some extra backing. High profile politicians, MPs like Kirti Azad and other Rajasthan MPs, called him their guru. So he concentrated on business expansion and started learning how to speak English with an eye on foreign funds and customers during the Commonwealth Games. Little did he know that the police also had extra help—from two of his former associates who’d been arrested in 2008.

Seven years later, another police force, another state, but the same trap got him again.

If schizophrenia doesn’t work, Dwivedi can play the ‘bad childhood’ card for sympathy. Crime seems to be a family tradition. His father, Bachcha Lal is listed as an accomplice of a known UP bandit and has five criminal cases registered against him, including murder, dowry death and theft. His elder brother was booked for the murder of his wife, while his younger brothers were booked in theft cases in 2001. But despite all this, he and his father both managed to get weapons registered in their names (Dwivedi got his in 2009).

The swami, however, seems to want better for his daughter. While his wife Munni Devi lives in Chitrakoot, his 13-year-old daughter studies at a boarding school in Maharashtra. His father used to live in the Khanpur ashram till fairly recently with his nephew, as the temple pujari tells us.

There is something creepy about the ashram and it’s a little difficult to get that feeling in a place as crowded as Khanpur. When Open visited, it was deserted, save four bored cameramen across the lane. Even though people around are more than vocal about the “dhanda” he was running in the name of Sai, you can barely miss the Sai general store opposite his Sai temple, and alongside it, a hand-written ad for a Sai ‘crache’ (crèche).

As we step up past a foul smelling basement, there is no khaki uniform in sight. A door to the left leads to a worship hall, a secret opening in its floor looking down into the space below. There’s a series of locked doors in front, and a passageway to a tackily painted spooky tunnel. We try a door handle of a door. It creaks open. We pause. No one shoos us off. This is the swami’s living room, though he didn’t live here much. A gaudy couch sits across a TV and a mobile handset bill lies beside it; on the left is a picture of his; a doctor’s prescription for one Balwendra Dwivedi lies on a chair and strewn books testify to a police search. Still no one comes.

Encouraged, we climb further up. We see the temple dome, another series of locked rooms, and yet another narrow staircase. A door on the left opens reluctantly. We see mattresses, cigarette butts and shiny silver boxes, still more butts, and another door. Inside, over a pair of upturned mattresses lie huge clumps of hair and a golden kada. It’s strangely creepy and we retreat. But there’s another floor, this time with a small metal ladder leading to a series of locked but inhabited rooms, again with interconnecting doors.

Why so many doors? We wonder, before chancing upon Ritu, her bhabhi and her child. They live in the neighbourhood and have been drawn here by TV-fuelled curiosity. But within moments, Ritu and her entourage turn around and flee.

“Humein darr lag raha hai,” she says.

Fear? In the house of God?

godmenIchchadhari Swami Bhimanand Ji MaharajSai BabascandalShiv Murat DwivediShiv Murti