Victims Of A Guru

Misplaced faith in the positive influence of the Dera Sacha Sauda makes a sarpanch of a village in Kurukshetra send his grown-up daughter and son to live there, but the decision proves costly.

- T.K. Rajalakshmi

KHANPUR KOLIAN village in Pipli block in Kurukshetra district of Haryana lies on the Grand Trunk Highway. The narrow entry to the village is as nondescript as its location, but it is from here that in 2002 an anonymous letter went out to the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, and to a few concerned citizens in the village. Others to receive the copy were Jagmati Sangwan, the then general secretary of the All India Democratic Women’s Association, and Raja Ram Handaiya, the president of the Rationalist Society.

Khanpur Kolian was the ancestral home of its seven-time sarpanch, Joginder Singh, who was an ardent follower of Gurmeet Singh. All his children, including his five daughters and the only son, Ranjit Singh, served at the Dera Sacha Sauda. A Jat, Joginder Singh organised satsangs whenever Gurmeet Singh was in the area. Ranjit Singh was an important sewadaar [worker] in the Dera from 1972 and handled the prayer meeting expenses of Pipli. “There was a special room for Babaji in our house,” Ranjit Singh’s college-going son said. The family owned about 100 acres (40 hectares). Joginder Singh was afraid that his only son would fall into bad company and decided to send him to the Dera. Joginder Singh had a good reputation in the village and that influenced many people from the village and the neighbouring areas to join the Dera. The anonymous letter also reached Balwant Singh, a “rationalist” and a friend of the sarpanch. “We were sitting at a tea shop when the postman arrived with the letter. It had no name; the sender’s address was smudged. Some of us read it and the contents just shocked us beyond words,” he told Frontline.