After Raid, Indian Guru’s Protest Stirs a Firestorm

 

“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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A Pope’s Beatification Stirs Excitement and Dissension

 

VATICAN CITY — On a sunny afternoon this week, St. Peter’s Square was abuzz with life. Crowds lined up at the metal detectors. Tourists snapped photos. A workman was spraying down the travertine steps to the basilica. And inside, red cloth screens cordoned off a side chapel that will soon draw as many visitors as Michelangelo’s Pietà nearby.

Starting Sunday, that chapel is where the entombed remains of Pope John Paul II will be on view for public veneration — after Pope Benedict XVI presides over the biggest spectacle since his own installation in 2005: a beatification Mass that will move his adored predecessor a step closer to sainthood.

The beatification is widely seen as a way not just to honor John Paul but to energize the Roman Catholic Church. Yet, like John Paul’s 26-year papacy itself, it has become intensely polarizing.

For one thing, Benedict waived the traditional five-year wait and began the process weeks after John Paul’s death, and critics across the Catholic spectrum have questioned the alacrity. Others say that the sex abuse crisis that emerged under John Paul is grounds against sainthood. On Saturday, at least one victims’ group plans a worldwide protest.

Defenders, however, say beatification is simply the formal seal of approval for a wildly popular pope who helped bring down Communism and whom many Catholics, especially in his native Poland, already consider a saint. Hundreds of thousands are expected in Rome, the biggest crowds since 2005, when cries of “Santo subito!” or “Sainthood now,” erupted at his funeral Mass.

“This beatification is different because this pope is different. He’s a man with a role in history, not just in church history,” said Andrea Riccardi, the founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio, a liberal Catholic group and a biographer of John Paul who testified in his favor in the beatification process. “The seal of sainthood doesn’t close the debate on history,” he added. “In a certain sense, for many Catholics he’s already a saint, even without beatification and, let’s be honest, even without a miracle.”

Saint-making is intensely political. The impulse must arise from the faithful, but ultimately most saints’ causes are championed by religious groups with the organizational skills, and fund-raising, to keep their causes alive. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and head of the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog, Pope Benedict in 1989 criticized this tendency, saying there had been too many beatifications of marginal figures.

But John Paul was an avid saint-maker who loosened the rules to make the process easier. He beatified more than 1,300 people and canonized 482 saints. Since 2005, Benedict has beatified 790 people and canonized 34 saints.

For John Paul to be beatified, a Vatican committee had to rule that he had performed a miracle. (To advance to sainthood, he needs an additional miracle.) In the proceedings, doctors and experts testified that a French nun had been miraculously cured from Parkinson’s disease after praying to John Paul. Their testimony was then notarized, and the committee certified the miracle.

To Vatican watchers, John Paul’s beatification is a snapshot of the Catholic Church in 2011 — mingling deep faith and dense bureaucracy, grass-roots devotion and top-down power politics, the medieval and the contemporary.

Those who cannot make the journey to Rome can follow the beatification on Twitter, become fans of John Paul on Facebook or watch the proceedings on the Vatican’s own YouTube channel. (This is, after all, the institution that quickly embraced the printing press and mass communications and whose own office of evangelization gave rise to the term propaganda.) A vial of John Paul’s blood, saved by a Rome hospital in case he needed a transfusion, will now be used as a holy relic.

In many ways, the beatification underscores how Benedict, a bookish yet never predictable pope whose papacy has been racked by crises and is intellectually focused on Europe, still derives much of his light and heat from his telegenic, globe-trotting predecessor.

But it also shows how dark clouds still hang over John Paul’s papacy, not least the sex abuse crisis and his close ties to the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the Mexican founder of the wealthy and powerful religious order Legionaries of Christ. Father Maciel, a charismatic leader hailed by John Paul as a model of dynamic priesthood, was later found to have fathered several children and abused seminarians. Last year, Benedict took the step of placing the entire order under Vatican receivership.

But during John Paul’s papacy, Vatican officials blocked an investigation of Father Maciel, and the pope publicly honored him in 2004 even after seminarians had come forward with allegations of abuse. Father Maciel was particularly close to John Paul’s longtime personal secretary, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, now the archbishop of Krakow, who has championed the beatification.

Critics say that in beatifying John Paul, the Vatican is trying to close the history books before they have been fully opened.