Source: BBC

By Samanthi Dissanayake

An Indian man who made his name exposing the “miraculous” feats of holy men as tricks has fled the country after being accused of blasphemy. Now in self-imposed exile in Finland, he fears jail – or even assassination – if he returns.

When a Hindu fakir declared on live television that he could kill anybody with tantric chanting, Sanal Edamaruku simply had to take him up on the challenge.

As both were guests in the studio, the fakir was put to the test immediately.

The channel cancelled all subsequent programming and he began chanting on the spot. But as the hours passed a note of desperation crept into his raspy mantras. For his part, Edamaruku, president of the Indian Rationalist Association, showed no sign of discomfort, let alone death. He merely chortled his way through this unconventional (and unsuccessful) attempt on his life.

He has spent his life as a prominent member of India’s small band of miracle-busters, men who dedicate their life to traversing the country demystifying certain beliefs.

It’s a nation often associated with profound spirituality, but rationalists see their country as a breeding ground for superstition.

In the 1990s Edamaruku visited hundreds of villages replicating the apparently fabulous feats some self-proclaimed holy men became renowned for – the materialisations of watches or “holy” ash – exposing them as mere sleight of hand.

As a campaigner determined to drill home his point, sometimes with an air of goading bemusement, he has attracted critics.

He readily admits he took advantage of the explosion in Indian television channels which discovered an audience fascinated with tales of the extraordinary.

“I was campaigning in villages for so long before the television came,” he says. “But some people do not like me to be going on television and reaching out to millions of people.”

But in 2012, four years after his televised encounter with the fakir, a steady drip of water from the toe of a statue of Christ genuinely did, he believes, put his life in danger.

Immediately hailed as a miracle, hundreds of Catholic devotees and other curious residents flocked to the shrine in a nondescript Mumbai suburb to watch the hypnotic drip. Some even drank the droplets.

Edamaruku was challenged to investigate and so he went to the site with an engineer friend and traced the source of the drip backwards. Moisture on the wall the statue was mounted on seemed to come from an overflowing drain, which was in turn fed by a pipe that issued from a nearby toilet.

The “miracle” was simply bad plumbing, he said.

It was then that the situation turned ugly.

He presented his case in a febrile live television debate with representatives of Catholic lobby groups, while outside the studio a threatening crowd bearing sticks had gathered. He claims they were hired thugs.

For some Catholics the veracity of the miracle is no longer the point. Edamaruku, they say, insulted the Catholic church, by alleging the church manufactured the miracle to make money, by claiming the church was anti-science and even casting doubt over the miracle that ensured Mother Theresa’s sainthood.

In the following weeks, three police stations in Mumbai took up blasphemy cases filed against him by Catholic groups under the notorious Section 295a of India’s colonial-era penal code.

Section 295a was enacted in 1927 to curb hate speech in a restless colony bristling with religious and communal tensions. It makes “deliberate and malicious” speech insulting to religion punishable with up to three years in prison and a fine. However, some say it is frequently abused to suppress free speech.

“Under this law a policeman can simply arrest me even though there has been no investigation… they can just arrest me without a warrant and keep me in prison for a long time… That risk I do not want to take,” says Edamaruku.

He applied for anticipatory bail, which would prevent police taking him into custody before any investigation – but this was rejected. At the same time, he says, he was getting threatening phone calls from policemen proclaiming their intention to arrest him and telling him that unless he apologised the complaint would never be withdrawn.

Threatening comments were posted on an online forum, he says, and contacts in Mumbai told him they had heard talk of somebody being hired to beat him in jail. Catholic groups say they aren’t behind any threats Mr Edamaruku may have received.

He decided to leave early for a European lecture tour. Finland was the first country to give him a visa and he had friends on the Finnish humanist scene willing to help.

He arrived in Helsinki on a summer afternoon two years ago, the endless hours of sunlight saturating both day and night. He thought he would only stay for a couple of weeks until the furore he left behind in India had died down.

But the furore has not died down – the Catholic Secular Forum (CSF), one of the groups that made the initial complaint, still insists it will press for prosecution should he ever return.

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