Jayant Athavale
Islamophobic Remarks :
The Hindu militant organization Sanatan Sanstha was co-founded by Jayant Athavale, his wife, Dr. Kunda, and Dr. Ashutosh Prabhudesai. The state of Goa in India serves as the organization’s headquarters.
After earning his MBBS in 1964, Dr. Athavale spent five years working in various Mumbai hospitals. Later, he relocated to the UK and successfully practiced hypnotherapy, becoming a skilled hypnotherapist.
Dr. Athavale, who views himself as a Godman, has as his main goal creating a “Hindu Nation” in India. He is highly regarded by his adherents. They have come to believe that he has undergone “divine changes” as time has gone on.
The organization’s site, englishsanatanprabhat.blogspot, describes Athavale as the “personification of God.”
The Sanatan Sanstha has said in numerous issues of Sanatan Prabhat that their goal is to create a Hindu Rashtra by the year 2023. Muslims, Christians, rationalists, and communists are all attacked in its writings and headlines as evildoers. Imagine how you would feel after killing a bad person, remarked Athavale, as quoted in the Sanatan Prabhat in 2007. “You feel so triumphant after killing a mosquito,” he said.
Athavale has made it known that his movement’s goal is to bring about Ishwary Rajya, or the Kingdom of God, on earth by eliminating durjans, or evildoers, who engage in “bad habits,” “misinterpreted religious beliefs,” and “bad politics, economy, and culture.”
In the November 2006 issue of the Marathi periodical Kirloskar, which is published from Pune, rationalist, hypnotherapist, and founder of Akhil Bharatiya Andhshraddha Nirmoolan Samiti (All India Committee for the Eradication of Superstitions) Shyam Manav wrote a harsh critique of the Sanstha. He claims to have been a close friend of Athavale from 1985 to 1990.
“Even though the Sanstha was established in 1999, I had realized in the early 1990s that Athavale had become distracted from the science of hypnotherapy by his concern with spirituality. He had begun using magic tricks, which I was aware of because I knew many magicians, to assert his own paranormal and spiritual abilities, Manav claimed. With the help of ‘Sanatan Prabhat,’ Jayant Athavale began programming minds and establishing a cult using his hypnosis abilities.
Athavala referred to the murder of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar in 2013 as “a blessing from God,” as he had avoided a lengthy, agonizing death from old age.
Concerning Sanatan Sanstha
Six members of Sanatan Sanstha were arrested by the Maharashtra Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS) in 2008 after homemade bombs were planted at theatres and auditoriums in cities near Mumbai in protest against a play and a film; two of them were convicted in 2011 and four were acquitted. The wider Sanatan Sanstha family includes violent organizations including Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, Shri Sriram Sene, and Hindu Yuva Sena.
The organisation came under the spotlight after the 2009 blast in Madgaon (Margao), Goa, when many of its members were questioned. Six people linked to the Sanatan Sanstha were tried over the blast; all were acquitted in 2013, and the Bombay High Court upheld the acquittals in 2020. People linked to the Sanstha have also been arrested and charged in the murders of rationalists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare, scholar MM Kalburgi and journalist Gauri Lankesh. No court has held the organisation itself responsible for those killings, and Athavale has not been charged in any of them. The organisation has been accused of using hypnosis techniques to recruit and influence members.
A senior scientist at a chemical business in Khopoli, close to Mumbai, named Vijay Rokade filed a plea in the Bombay high court in 2011 accusing the Sanstha of being a “terrorist organization and seeking a ban.” 2018 saw the arrest of Sanatan members by Maharashtra’s Anti-Terrorism Squad as well as the discovery in Mumbai’s Nalasopara of a sizable cache of illicit weapons and homemade devices. Many states reportedly considered outlawing the organization. Sanatan is a group that has been classified as a terrorist organization by the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium (TRAC).
