The night yoga guru Ramdev was evicted from the Ramlila Maidan, the site of his 'satyagraha' against corruption, was the night that made him a bigger persona than he actually is.
I respect the man for his contribution to yoga and ayurveda and his significant efforts to make the two accessible to and popular among the masses. Even if they were accompanied by statements such as homosexuality is a disease that can be treated with yoga.
But his actions on the night of June 4 are beyond comprehension and what cast doubt on his dauntless persona. Why did Baba Ramdev sprint off from the stage and hide among his followers when the police came charging?
Baba's claims are that government/police intentions were not saintly and they had orders to either arrest him or kill him in an encounter or take him to an undisclosed location.
Getting arrested should not be a cause of concern for the guru who didn't think much of standing against the most powerful in the country. Politically, it would have strengthened his campaign and there wasn't any charge he could have been booked under, anyway.
Could the police then have dared to kill him in front of thousands of his followers or taken him to an undisclosed location, done the deed and gotten away with it? It wouldn't be too surprising, given the lengths the police went to, to remove people from the ground in an operation being planned for three days.
"Such kind of cruelty was not even seen in Jallianwala Bagh," Baba describes the events of the night in a press conference.Is he comparing British General Dyer's machine-gun massacre that killed thousand unarmed Indians who had no route of escape to this? Another hyperbole.
He also added, "I am not scared of death. But, I didn't want to die in such a barbaric act."
No hyperbole there though. The police was barbaric in its actions. Beating up of children and manhandling of the aged and women could not have possibly been among the Centre's orders for the crackdown. Was the police blind not see where its lathis landed?
CCTV footage of the horrific night could have answered some of these questions but unsurprisingly, it was confiscated by the Delhi police.
