[In her book “Gurus: Stories of India’s Leading Babas,” the journalist Bhavdeep Kang wrote that Mobutu Sese Seko, the military dictator of Zaire, would invite Chandraswamy to Kinshasa, the capital, and ask him to hide behind a curtain during an important meeting, then ask his advice on whether the visitor could be trusted.]
By Ellen Barry
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Chandraswamy in 2007. His
ashram became a hub for Delhi’s power circles in
the early 1990s, but his
vast network of connections crumbled when he was
arrested in connection
with a fraud scandal. He was later acquitted.
Credit Varun Kumar
Jaiswal/Associated Press
|
NEW
DELHI — Chandraswamy, a
Hindu holy man who counseled such 1980s glitterati as Elizabeth Taylor, the
Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and the Sultan of Brunei before coming under
a barrage of criminal investigations, died here on May 23. He was 66.
A spokesman for Apollo Hospital said
Chandraswamy had a stroke recently and died there.
Born Nemi Chand Jain, the son of a Rajasthani
moneylender, Chandraswamy left home to study astrology and meditation, only to
emerge a few years later as a “guru on the make,” said Vinay Sitapati, a
political scientist who interviewed him for a book. How Chandraswamy spent the
intervening time was never clear.
In the decades that followed, he built a vast
network of political connections, most of them in the governing Indian National
Congress, Mr. Sitapati said. In doing so he became an influential purveyor of
information about India’s power centers and of that coveted good: access.
Rustic in appearance, with his wood staff and
flowing beard, Chandraswamy proved skillful at winning the trust of international
leaders, securing their confidence by rattling off the names of his influential
confidants and performing such seemingly supernatural feats as mind reading.
Often he would ask a new acquaintance to
write questions on scraps of paper, crumple the scraps into balls, and then
repeat each question as they unfolded the paper.
“He closed his eyes and went into a trance,”
K. Natwar Singh, a senior diplomat, wrote. “Suddenly he asked my wife to pick
up any of the paper balls. She did so. Opened it. Chandraswamy then told her
what the question was. He was spot on.”
In the mid-1970s, Mr. Singh arranged a
meeting between Chandraswamy and Margaret Thatcher, then the newly elected
leader of Britain’s Conservative Party. (She was elected prime minister in
1979.) He said he had watched her skepticism melt away as the “godman,” as he
called him, who spoke only Hindi, guessed her scribbled questions correctly.
“By the fourth question, the future iron
lady’s demeanor changed,” Mr. Singh wrote. Mrs. Thatcher was so impressed, he
said, that she asked for a second appointment, and even agreed to his request
that she wear a red dress.
This talent, “for entering the heads of
others,” as one journalist put it, gave Chandraswamy access to all manner of
regents and superstars in a period when India’s economy was beginning to tap
into international networks.
In her book “Gurus: Stories of India’s
Leading Babas,” the journalist Bhavdeep Kang wrote that Mobutu Sese Seko, the
military dictator of Zaire, would invite Chandraswamy to Kinshasa, the capital,
and ask him to hide behind a curtain during an important meeting, then ask his
advice on whether the visitor could be trusted.
Mr. Singh, the diplomat, recalled landing in
the Bahamas and struggling fruitlessly to get an appointment with the prime
minister there, only to get an unexpected call from a chuckling Chandraswamy —
who, Mr. Singh said, had not been told of his travel plans — informing him that
he had arranged a meeting between the men for the next day.
Among Chandraswamy’s patrons, none mattered
more than P. V. Narasimha Rao, India’s prime minister from 1991 to 1996.
The two had met in 1971 at the Hindu temple
Tirupati Balaji and entered into a kind of symbiosis. Mr. Rao was “a bit of a
provincial country bumpkin” eager for the contacts and intelligence the guru
could provide. Chandraswamy won him over by passing on what other party members
were saying about him, said Mr. Sitapati, author of the biography “Half-Lion:
How P. V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India.”
“He needed someone like Chandraswamy who
could use the back channels,” Mr. Sitapati said.
When Mr. Rao was unexpectedly named prime
minister in 1991, after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, Chandraswamy’s
ashram became a hub for Delhi’s power circles. He vacationed aboard Mr.
Khashoggi’s 282-foot yacht, Nabila. (It was later used as a set for a James
Bond film and owned for a time by Donald J. Trump.)
Subramanian Swamy, a member of Parliament and
a longtime friend of the guru’s, said Chandraswamy’s prominence began to
attract ill will.
“He was jetting around the world, living in
great comfort,” Mr. Swamy said. “A guru is supposed to sit in a hut.”
His time in the limelight ended with
breathtaking swiftness.
In 1996, Chandraswamy was arrested on charges
of defrauding Lakhubhai Pathak, a London-based Indian-born businessman, of
$100,000. Mr. Pathak, nicknamed the “pickle king” by the popular news media for
the commodity his family business sold, claimed the money he had given to
Chandraswamy was meant for Mr. Rao, who left power in 1996. Chandraswamy was
acquitted in the case, as was Mr. Rao, who faced fraud charges.
An income-tax raid on the guru’s ashram
reportedly turned up records of $11 million in payments to Mr. Khashoggi, who
was later implicated as a middleman in the Iran-contra scandal, the clandestine
effort in which the Reagan administration sold arms to Iran and channeled the
proceeds illegally to right-wing counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua.
In 1997, Congress Party leaders suggested
that Chandraswamy was party to the conspiracy that led to Mr. Gandhi’s
assassination, though the investigation was curtailed the next year and he was
never charged. He was prohibited from traveling abroad, however, and
politicians who had sought Chandraswamy’s blessings for years now avoided him.
Even Mr. Rao, his old friend, kept his distance.
“Many of these people, who looked upon him as
a spiritual person, seeing that he was not able to protect himself — naturally,
there was a devaluation,” Mr. Swamy said. “They suddenly felt, if this is what
the state is doing to him, you better avoid him.”
Mr. Sitapati, who interviewed the guru
repeatedly in 2015 and 2016, said Chandraswamy’s only visitors were low-level
officials.
“He had a very lonely life,” he said. “His
face would totally light up when he started talking about the 1970s and 1980s.
It was really like the autumn of the patriarch.”
There was no immediate word on whether he
left survivors.
Chandraswamy was cremated last week on the
banks of the Yamuna River in a ceremony attended by a handful of mourners. The
Press Trust of India said there were no V.I.P.s among them.
Ayesha Venkataraman contributed reporting.