·         “Only 5-6 people are not the culprits. The victim daughter is as guilty as her rapists... She should have called the culprits brothers and begged before them to stop... This could have saved her dignity and life. Can one hand clap? I don't think so.”

—     Asaram Bapu is believed to have said. (Read here)

·         Neelam Dubey, Asaram Bapu’s spokesperson, in a telephonic conversation with CNN-IBN anchor sounded even more absurd and lost her cool in the middle of the conversation and disconnected the line.  

·         BJP spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad quickly issued a statement and condemned the statement.

·         The self-proclaimed godman is also learnt to have said that he was against harsher punishments for the accused as the law could be misutilised. “We have often seen such laws are made to be misutilised... Dowry harassment law is the biggest example,” he said.  (Read here)

Also read:
Asaram Bapu, who?
Pray shut up, sir!
Baba, don’t preach!

The godman who wears an adorned crown in thousands of posters put up all over the religious and non-religious cities across India is suddenly the hate guy. Even the lakhs who hear him speak on devotional TV channels about the merits of ascetic life while sitting on his decked out throne are nonplussed. And those who have had even once the privilege of sprinkling with marigold the red carpet that takes the godman’s holy feet from his various Mercs and BMWs to his throne are in a state of disbelief. How could he have said that? Well, he has. 

And such foot-in-mouths just wait to happen. Since these holymen are bound by the 24x7 devotional channels’s tough regimen to preach. While religious preachings were always meant to be taken in small draughts, discourses no wonder sometimes wander to include various other courses — not all of which are desserts. Like the present one.

When you talk all the time and have sadly ready audience in scores, you can’t talk always sense. Today’s muse for the TV channels, Asaram is no different from hundred others speaking non-stop on all topics right from rocket engineering to gastronomy on various devotional TV channels. It is just that Asaram has had a bad day today. If you have time and patience to discover such pearls of uncalled-for wisdom, there is a whole lot sea waiting to be discovered at these TV channels. Nirmal Baba was discovered here only a few months ago.   

If you ever had a bad attack of cervical sprain and were advised like me to watch a certain yoga guru to learn a few poses, you would know how antagonising watching these TV channels can be. The guru would talk about everything from politics to culture to history to tourism, but not what you need to hear him say. In the middle of these, he would roll his belly as if it were a blender and ask you to repeat! I ain’t no belly dancer, so I don’t even try. He would teach you the right poses no doubt but at an expense — he would fill your mind with his extravagant bullshitting.