NEW DELHI: An Indian court has allowed the body of a long dead guru to be placed in a freezer on the insistence of his followers, The Telegraph reported.
Ashutosh Maharaj, founder of the sect Divya Jyoti Jagriti Sansthan (Divine Light Awakening Mission), died of a possible heart attack in 2014. However, his followers insist that he is only in a state of deep meditation and will one day return to life.
To stop the natural decay of his body they had placed it in a commercial freezer at Ashutosh‘s vast ashram in Punjab shortly after his demise. Swami Vishalanand, the guru’s spokesman had told the media in 2014 that Ashutosh was “not dead”. “Medical science does not understand things like yogic science. We will wait and watch. We are confident that he will come back.”
The judgment by Punjab and Haryana High Court ends a three-year-old legal battle between the guru’s disciples and Dalip Kumar Jha, who claims to be his son. He had wanted to cremate his father’s body in line with Hindu rituals and had nearly won the case in 2014 when a court judgment had ordered that the guru’s body be cremated after doctors had examined Ashutosh and confirmed him to be clinically dead.
However, this latest decision by the courts had set aside the 2014 judgment and has been clearly in the favor of the guru’s disciples. Jha’s lawyer told a foreign news agency it was uncertain by this new turn of events whether the court now agreed with the sect’s argument that its founder was simply meditating.
Jha has also accused the guru’s disciples of retaining his body as a plot to keep control of his wealth. Ashutosh’s sect, which was first established in Jalandhar, Punjab, in 1983, has attracted millions of followers over the years and has also amassed properties worth an estimated $120m (£92m) in India, the US, South America, Australia, the Middle East, and Europe. The sect’s wealth also includes the heavily-guarded 100-acre ashram in Punjab where the guru’s body is now being kept.
