It’s a Sunday morning and I give myself a stretch to scroll down the twitter feed on my phone. Firstpost’s tweet “Ram Rahim convicted of rape, followers abandon crumbling Dera empire and return to Sikhism” counts up the ongoing mental surmises that I almost reserved for the last two months. “That needs some serious pondering”, I talk to myself, while briefly shutting off the virtual world on my phone. I try to draw up a connection with those followers to the fervor of my two employees who stood firm on taking a week-long leave [unpaid, huh!] to offer their voluntary services at a Dera [religious sect] yesterday.
For the last two months, I’ve been studying for a creative writing program under the instructor Julia Scheeres, author of the book ‘A Thousand Lives’- the untold story of a haunting account of people belonging to the People’s Temple in Jonestown [a religious cult founded by preacher Jim Jones] that were victims to a massacre/mass suicide orchestrated by Jim Jones. Coincidently, from college days, I’d been following up on the ‘Jonestown Massacre’ as a case study for ‘psychodynamics of cultism’ to understand why a thousand people committed suicide by drinking the Kool-Aid and cyanide mixture voluntarily in Guyana [USA] in 1978.
I draw up a startling commonality between the Jonestown cult and the Dera culture in India. Scheeres accounts in her book “Blacks and whites stood side by side like keys on a piano” and the article by Firstpost today recounts the impressions of an anti-Dera interviewee who believes the followers were driven to the Dera by discrimination wherein those from certain castes were promised respect and equality. So, status equality is what pulls them in.
I probably may be looking at ‘destructive cultism’ here. However, within the Indian context, I’m trying to reach out to all possible theories- Why do people join cults at all? And then, abandon the disintegrating camp with injured spirits? What happens to the faith that recruited them in?
I am beginning to suspect whether the devotion cults have much to do with a quest for religious connections at all? It all seems to be a strange hybrid of those seeking a sense of identity, respect, recognition, and inclusion. Many of these followers, for whom I’d more appropriately speak of as ‘cult members’, are in pursuit of a reprogramming on the way to see the world [something they refer to as ‘spiritual enlightenment’]. While countless others turn to the Deras for a psychological respite from the caste inferiority, and a sense of alleviation with them being embraced into the religious faction. Ridiculously, many of these cults have also assumed the form of amusement centers and recreational avenues for their followers who confuse their ‘religious-tourism’ as ‘spiritual-mindedness’.
Coming back and staying away from a comment on whether any merit sustains the rape accusation on the Dera chief Ram Rahim, let me just give a closure to this piece with John Gimlette’s note in his Wall Street Journal Review of the book ‘A Thousand Lives’, “For most, it may simply be that we are as vulnerable in groups as we are alone.”
So, are you seeking safety and recognition in a religious, racial, mystical, or a pseudo-psychological cult? Think