“The government wanted to kill me,” he said on national television hours after the hunger strikers in New Delhi were scattered by police officers spraying tear gas. “My hunger strike is not broken. I will continue. My agitation will continue.”
Swami Ramdev, a yoga guru with a large following in India, had organized the mass hunger strike that began Saturday in New Delhi. But less than 14 hours later, amid the tumult of the raid, he was detained by officers and flown to the state of Uttaranchal, where he was taken to his ashram near the city of Haridwar.
Appearing on national television, he described how he had tried in vain to escape the police raid by dressing as a woman and covering his flowing black beard with white cloth.
The police raid quickly transformed what had been a quirky mixture of yoga sit-in and political protest into a political firestorm. Leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., the country’s main opposition party, assailed the Congress Party as having mishandled the hunger strike and described the police action as “a shameful chapter in the democracy of this country.”
But Congress Party leaders were hardly apologetic and instead accused Swami Ramdev of trying to deliberately stir up trouble as a proxy for the Bharatiya Janata Party and right-wing Hindu groups. “You cannot allow people like Ramdev to run riot in the capital,” said Digvijay Singh, a powerful Congress Party leader who has been outspoken in his criticism of the swami. “He was trying to incite people. Therefore, the action of the police is justified.”
Other Congress Party leaders said Swami Ramdev had deliberately violated a secret agreement to cancel his hunger strike on Saturday afternoon. The swami had focused his protest on the issue of “black money,” the untold billions of misappropriated dollars stashed in foreign banks.
Last week, ministers met with him several times to explain government initiatives on the issue as part of their effort to head off the hunger strike, and on Saturday he announced that the government had met his demands. But after the government announced publicly that there had been an agreement and that Swami Ramdev had promised to end the strike, he angrily vowed that the strike would go on.
On Sunday morning, the police moved in to break up the protest.
Kapil Sibal, the Congress Party’s point man on the issue, said the government delegation actually struck a deal with the swami on Friday. In it the government pledged to take certain actions on black money, he said, while Swami Ramdev agreed that he would strike on Saturday morning but call it off by the afternoon.
But when Swami Ramdev continued with his fast into Saturday evening, Mr. Sibal appeared before reporters with a written copy of the secret agreement and accused the yoga guru of breaking their deal.
The Delhi police said Sunday that they had broken up the demonstration because Swami Ramdev had a permit to conduct a yoga meditation session with 5,000 people but that the crowd had surpassed 50,000 and he was imploring more people to come to New Delhi to join the strike.
Rajan Bhagat, a police spokesman, denied that the police had instigated the confrontation. He said some protesters began pelting officers with bricks after the police ordered everyone to go home. Officers then used tear gas to disperse the crowd.
Mr. Bhagat said that 23 police officers and 39 civilians were slightly injured in the ensuing scuffle.
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