[Image: Nithyananda on Kailash / Facebook]
Followers of a fugitive Hindu guru on a mission to establish his own state are popping up across Latin America, with contracts showing how he created a fictional country that controls vast swathes of Indigenous land in the Bolivian Amazon ‘with full sovereignty.’
The so-called United States of Kailaasa is being created by self-anointed “godman” and the “supreme pontiff of Hinduism,” Nithyananda, who fled India in 2019 after being charged with abducting children for his ashram and one of raping a follower.
At the end of last year, a representative of the Baure Indigenous people in the Bolivian Amazon signed a “perpetual” contract leasing 60,000 hectares (148,260 acres) of their vast rainforest for $108,000 a year.
A representative of the Cayubaba Indigenous people signed a similar contract, leasing 31,000 hectares for $55,800 annually. After failed attempts to buy land in Ecuador and Paraguay – and even signing an agreement with the US city of Newark, which was later scrapped when officials realised Kailaasa did not exist – the fake country turned to Bolivia.
Bolivian newspaper El Deber exposed the shenanigans last month after revealing that the United States of Kailaasa signed contracts with at least four Indigenous groups for the 1,000-year lease “with automatic and perpetual renewal” of their lands.
“When I first read the contracts, I thought, ‘I must be imagining this.’ They were so irrational that it felt like magical realism,” said Silvana Vicenti, the journalist who broke the story.
According to contracts seen by the Guardian, Kailaasa would control vast swathes of land “with full sovereignty and autonomy” within each Indigenous territory, including rights over the airspace and all natural resources above or below the ground.
“A monarchy with Indigenous subjects.”
The Indigenous groups would be obliged to “defend Kailaasa in any legal proceedings” and support its recognition “as a sovereign and independent state, protect it against aggression, and back its admission to international organisations such as the UN”.
Jhovana Morales, a lawyer from Fundación Tierra, an NGO that works on Indigenous land issues, said the contracts were abusive and violated several Bolivian laws.
“The contracts are a total scam,” said Morales. “But the strangest part is that, to this day, no one knows exactly what happened. First, how did they get in? How did they reach these places and start directly approaching sectors of Indigenous Amazonian territory?”
The Bolivian government has yet to provide answers, but a recent photo has begun circulating, showing Bolivian president Luis Arce smiling as he receives a book entitled United States of Kailaasa from a woman wearing a saffron-coloured sari.
Nobody knows where Nithyananda currently is, but he did do a “live presidential address” on YouTube last Wednesday to dispel “malicious rumours” allegedly spread by “anti-Hindu media outlets” claiming he was dead.
[Source: Guardian]
