Sanatan Sanstha- Is The Spiritual Organisation Breeding Saints Or Terrorists?

The Sanatan Sanstha is in the eye of a storm for its alleged link to the killers of four liberal thinkers. The Sanstha, however, claims it breeds saints, not sinners

- Prathima Nandakumar

The Sanatan Sanstha’s declared goal is the “reinstatement of divine kingdom”. The radical Hindu organisations, which was founded by hypnotherapist Jayant Athavale in 1991, seems to have a plan in place to fulfil that. The Sanstha has been spreading its wings from its headquarters in Ponda, Goa. Around 300 outfits are now said to be associated with it. The Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS), an affiliate set up in 2002, has been in the public glare, often more than the parent organisation, owing to its religious and social activities.

The first time the Sanstha got nationwide attention, however, was for the wrong reasons. In 2008, it was named in the bomb blasts in the Mumbai suburbs of Panvel, Thane and Vashi. It was alleged that Hindu activists planted crude bombs at cultural venues to protest the staging of the play Amhi Pachpute, which allegedly portrayed Hindu deities in a bad light. The prosecution contended that all six persons accused in the case were members of the Sanstha. Two of them were convicted.

A year later, the organisation’s name popped up in the Madgaon bomb blast case. In September 2016, a special investigation team claimed to have recovered psychotropic drugs from the Sanstha’s Panvel ashram.

What put the Sanstha in the eye of a storm was its alleged links to the killers of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar (killed in 2013), communist leader Govind Pansare (killed in 2015), Kannada scholar M.M. Kalburgi (killed in 2015) and journalist Gauri Lankesh (killed in 2017). The special investigation team probing Lankesh’s murder has said that a large network of indoctrinated youths trained in using firearms has taken up the cause of “protecting dharma”. It is said to have a hit list of some 25 “anti-Hindu intellectuals”.