Godman stages suicide drama at police station

All through the two-hour drama hogging all TV channels in the state, the cops made no attempt at all to disarm the godman lording over their police station — he even had the cops help recharge his mobile so that he could keep calling up people with his free hand and held the gun with the other. Senior police officers kept pleading with him to go easy on the trigger.

The drama ended with the Swami pulling the trigger, finally. But instead of shooting the reporters or himself, he shot through the police station roof. A bullet grazed his own left hand and the godman collapsed in a howling heap, leaving startled cops in the room to run for their lives. The police, however, picked up a media reporter who screamed and went down as soon as the swami fired. The police rushed him to hospital while TV channels began saying he had been shot. But the man soon came to, only to say he had fainted in fright.

Swami Bhadranandaji, who runs an outfit called “Karma” in Kochi, began falling out with the media after some local newspapers began poking into his activities after the fall of another high-profile local godman, Swami Amritachaitanya last week. The latter was exposed to have been a fraudster wanted by Interpol — besides a porn video star and producer, mostly using under-age girls from poor families, many lured in with educational sponsorships.

Bhadranandaji, who loved dropping names and claiming high political connections, even fixed an official red beacon of the kind ministers, high court judges and senior officials use, on the dome of his personal car. He had a sizeable following in Kochi and Kozhikode, and had often been hogging attention with his predictions and claims, including his political prophesies, until reports hinted at a darker side too.

The swami had barged into a local newspaper office on Friday and threatened the staff there for printing some unedifying reports, and the police had promptly filed a case against him. On Saturday morning, he called the media to his home to announce his protest suicide, and the police had got him to shift the drama to the police station instead.

Home Minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan said the swami appeared to have got a gun license from the local administration without police verification. Though the swami had claimed the minister was his close pal, Balakrishnan denied it.