35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

162
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
sizable number of voters. Also, I heard, his support took a still more
tangible form in campaign contributions.
Only the following year, when that hard-core Gandhian, Morarji
Desai, shed his chains and moved out of house arrest into the prime
minister’s office, did the reasons for Rajneesh’s enthusiasm for a
Nehru dynasty become apparent. A crackdown on foreigners
visiting Poona soon began. Suddenly the newspapers splashed
scathing articles across their pages denouncing the bhagwan as a
pervert, a fraud, a greedy charlatan.
Then, a few months after Mrs Gandhi was re-elected as India’s
prime minister in January 1980, a Hindu fundamentalist got up
during one of the bhagwan’s discourses, shouting out that Rajneesh
was maligning his religion and these insults could no longer be
tolerated. The man tried to run at Bhagwan’s podium, to be blocked
by the squad of ashram guards. Just before the guards could grab
him, he hurled a large knife at Rajneesh. Some might say it was
unfortunate that the knife clattered harmlessly on the floor, nowhere
near its target, who was reported to have continued his talk unfazed.
Official Foundation accounts have the knife missing the ashram’s
god by a mere fraction, and insist he did not blink or miss a beat in
his discourse throughout the entire incident. The managing trustee,
Ma Yoga Laxmi herself, pulled out all the stops in a farcically
hyperbolic press release, characterising the business as an
assassination, comparing what the bhagwan had suffered to
Buddha’s stoning, Mahavir’s torture, and even the murder of
Mahatma Gandhi – the man Rajneesh had often and openly reviled.
According to an eyewitness, however, the bhagwan was never in
any danger, since the knife fell nowhere near him. And his reaction
was hardly ‘unfazed.’ He shook, and his voice quavered as he tried
to continue his talk, which veered off into semicoherent rambling
in which he blatantly insulted Hinduism yet again.
A year or so after the so-called assassination attempt, and a couple
of arsons and explosions in Foundation buildings around the
country, Rajneesh moved himself and his Dionysian crew to
America, under the pretext of seeking medical attention.
Unfortunately, US immigration laws did not have a special category
for gods seeking American citizenship, although they did contain a