Secure Nithyananda, Centre tells Karnataka

Bengaluru, Dec 28: The Centre has asked the Karnataka Government to secure with the help of the CBI or the Interpol the absconding godman Nithyananda involved in sexual scandals and facing complaints from parents of young girls in his ashrams.

The Godman recently fled the country following these complaints and has released a video claiming that he has bought an island near Ecuador and established a nation which he has named Kailasam.

Jhansi Rani from Tiruchi  and mother of a 24-year-old girl who died under mysterious circumstances in Nithyananda’s ashram in Bidadi in Karnataka in 2014 has received a copy of the Union Ministry’s letter to the Yediyurappa Government.

Disclosing the copy of the letter to local television channels, Jhansi Rani said her daughter died in the ashram in 2014 and the godman’s men told her that she died after a heart attack. She said that she got a re-postmortem examination done  and it showed her daughter had marks of injuries on her.

Jhansi Rani said that her daughter during a visit before her death gave her a pen drive which contained the sexual exploits of Nithyananda. Jhansi Rani alleged that she was threatened by his followers. But she represented to the Karnataka police and also impleaded herself in a spate of petitions filed in the Karnataka High Court, seeking a CBI enquiry.

She said she recently wrote to the Union Home Ministry to press the demand. The Ministry, which wrote to the State Government on her representation, has also sought status of cases pending against the godman in the high court.

Similar complaints have been made by parents of two sisters from after Gujarat who joined the godman’s ashram in Bidadi. .

The Ahmedabad Police on Saturday filed a status report in the Gujarat High Court on its investigation into the whereabouts of the godman following a habeas corpus petition filed by a former Bengaluru resident Janardhan Sharma who alleged his two daughters aged 22 and 18 were being held against their will in the Bidadi ashram.  The police failed to produce the girls in court.

Sharma said he and his wife Uma Maheshwari were not allowed to meet their daughters when they visited the godman’s ashram in Hirapur in Gujarat.

Sharma said their daughter joined the ashram in Bidadi and they were later brought to another ashram in Hirapur on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. He said her eldest daughter had accompanied Nithyananda in his visits abroad.

The Gujarat police talked to the girls. They said they had become sanyasins and they were not being held against their will. His younger daughter, however told police the Gujarat police that she had been brought up in the ashram for the past six years and she was now a major as she is 19.

When videos went viral that NIthyananda had bought an island near Trinadad and Tobago in the West Indies after denied asylum by Ecuador, the Indian Foreign Ministry clarified that his passport had expired and he had not renewed it. It did not explain how he managed to flee the country then. Reports said he fled the country via Nepal.

According to the website of Nithyananda, he has founded  a nation calling it Sri Kailasa in the island. It says Sri Kailasa is a “nation without borders created by dispossessed Hindus from around the world who lost the right to practice Hinduism authentically in their own countries”.

Nithyananda, a native of Tamil Nadu, fled the State after a video surfaced showing him in a compromising position with actress Ranjitha.