Twelve days after the Archaeological Survey of India's efforts to unearth gold buried beneath the ruins of an Awadh ruler’s fort proved futile, the faith in local Hindu seer Shobhan Sarkar on whose advice the gold-pursuit had begun, has not diminished too much, or so it appears.
By the afternoon of 29 October, the ‘gold rush’ at the 19th century fort of Raja Rao Ram Bux in the Daudiya Kheda village of Uttar Pradesh’s Unnao district had almost fizzled out.
Twelve days after the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) began digging a 10×10 metre site after a local Hindu seer Shobhan Sarkar claimed he had dreamt about the presence of 1000 tonnes of gold buried beneath the ruins of the Awadh ruler’s fort, labourers hit a layer of gravel at 4.80 metres.
Though the ASI announced it would expand the area of excavation and look in another site close to the present one along the river Ganga, hundreds of anxious onlookers and visitors from the nearby districts of Fatehpur, Rae Bareilly and Kanpur began to leave. So did the dozens of food, snack and beverage vendors who had dotted the last 100 metres of both sides of the nearly three-metre wide and hardly motorable, red-brick road leading to the fort.
Media vans that jostled for space near the site and gave the nondescript village, located about 110 kilometres from UP’s capital of Lucknow, its “Peepli Live” moment in the last few days, also retreated. But the 140 police officials drawn from Unnao, other districts and the Provincial Armed Constabulary, a reserve force in UP, continue to guard the site.
However, the faith in Sarkar, on whose advice the gold-pursuit had begun, has not diminished too much, or so it appears. Some three kilometres away, at his modest ashram on the banks of the river Ganga in Buxar village, scores of followers continued to pour in. “If Sarkar has said it, there can be no denying the fact that there is gold hidden in the fort,” says Pushp Raj, a visitor from neighbouring Rae Bareilly. “The ASI should seek Sarkar’s advice before winding up the work.”
It’s not just ordinary gullible villagers who believe the seer blindly. Brijesh Pathak, a Rajya Sabha MP and Bahujan Samaj Party leader from the area says over the phone, “It is next to impossible that Sarkar’s claim can be wrong. People like me, who know him for several years, know the kind of saintly powers he holds. Let the ASI complete its work.” The seer has tremendous influence on not just villagers, but on some of the who’s who of both, UP and national politics. Besides Pathak, Sarkar’s list of believers and visitors include BJP national president Rajnath Singh, Samajwadi party leader and Mulayam Singh Yadav’s younger brother Shivpal Yadav, Unnao MP Annu Tandon and the Union minister of state for agriculture and food processing Charan Das Mahant, among several other politicians and bureaucrats.
Mahant, a Congress MP from the industrial town of Korba in Madhya Pradesh, was believed to be Sarkar’s pointsman in Delhi who wrote letters to the prime minister strongly suggesting the excavation.
Sunil Yadav, an advisor to UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, has been a regular at Sarkar’s ashram of late. He is reportedly seeking the seer’s intervention in getting UP a good share of gold, if found. Swami Om Ji, through whom Sarkar has been talking to the media says, “The state government has even agreed to carve out a separate district for the area’s development if it gets a sizeable share of the gold.”
Called either Sarkar or Bhagwan by the locals, the seer was born as Kashinath at Shuklanpurva village in the Kanpur Dehat district. Earlier known as Bhaskarananda Dev, he lived at Shobhan village in Kanpur Dehat with his guru Swami Satsanghananda. He later became his guru’s successor and came to be known as Shobhan Sarkar as the administrators of the ashrams at Shobhan village were referred to as “Sarkars.”
When INN Live met Sarkar in one of his ashrams at Buxar on the afternoon of 28 October, the man, who appeared to be in his sixties, was sitting on the ground dressed in a saffron coloured loin cloth. His tonsured head half-covered by a similar piece of cloth, he looked tired, but gazed at the 8-10 people who sat in front of him.
“He usually sits behind the iron grills. Today he has come out. You are lucky to see him so close,” whispered Pappu Singh, one of his followers, to this correspondent. “You are also lucky that Sarkar is in Buxar today. Otherwise, one never knows which of his 100 ashrams he is at. If word spreads that he is here right now, there would be a rush of visitors,” Singh, a local Samajwadi Party leader says. He tells this correspondent not to use a mobile phone or any recording device as this would anger the seer. “Sarkar likes peace. Also, if you want to talk to him, pretend to be a follower rather than a journalist,” he said.
Meanwhile, Sarkar seemed to be acting quite arbitrarily. He gazed blankly at everyone and murmured a few things in the local Awadhi dialect of which only a few things could be deciphered – the name Charan Das Mahant, gold and the prime minister.
None of the followers, except a young man from the ashram who brought him something to eat and some local editions of the Hindi newspapers spoke to him. He picked up the newspapers but just flipped through them for a few minutes before putting them aside. Then, for the first time in 10 minutes, he turned towards his followers and looked like he wanted to talk. When INN Live asked him if he thought the gold would be found by the ASI, Sarkar replied in Awadhi, in a very low tone. “He is saying the gold can be found if the ASI follows his exact suggestion,” Singh translates the seer’s reply. He was referring to Sarkar’s insistence that gold could be unearthed within a few hours if the excavation was carried out in the manner he suggested – by the army through heavy machines.
“Don’t think that he can’t speak your language. He speaks Hindi, English and even French, if he likes,” Rajendra Tiwari, another follower intervened to claim. Tiwari is such a staunch believer of Sarkar that he goes on to respond to this correspondent’s doubt about the presence of gold in Daudiya Khera by relating the issue with the 27 October serial blast in Bihar’s capital Patna. “The blasts happened in Patna because Nitish Kumar’s party (Janata Dal United) tried to make a mockery of Sarkar’s claims by lodging an FIR against Charan Das Mahant for raising the seer’s wish with the government in Delhi.”
Sarkar, had by now stood up and occupied a bed, weaved of ropes, in the open. Even though he lay under the shade of a tree nearby and closed his eyes, his followers claim he doesn’t sleep at all. “He is just resting, he never goes to sleep. He is always awake. You never know which other ashram he will make his next appearance in, without anyone realising he has left this place,” says Tiwari.
Stories are abound about Sarkar’s supernatural abilities in this region of Uttar Pradesh. He enjoys prominence in the villages lying on the banks of the river Ganga in Unnao, Rae Bareilly, Fatehpur and Kanpur districts. Most of his ashrams are located along the river and Sarkar uses a motorboat to visit them. “He once shook a Banyan tree and currency notes began falling from its branches,” says Kuldip, a quack in the area. Another person from a nearby village says, “Once, during a bhandara (a religious feast) at his ashram, the cooks ran short of oil. As the crowd kept swelling, Sarkar asked a few men from the ashram to fetch water from the river Ganga nearby. The Ganga water was used as a replacement for cooking oil.”
However, INN Live didn’t find a single believer of Sarkar who had witnessed these miracles himself. None of the villagers and even other sadhus who live in his ashrams, could vouch to be witness to any of the ‘supernatural powers’ of Sarkar.
The seer however, has been instrumental in getting two bridges constructed – a nearly 500-metre long, two-lane road bridge over the Ganga river and a relatively smaller bridge over the Pandav river- that connects Unnao with the neighbouring district of Fatehpur.
Locals recall how, some five years ago, Sarkar collected construction materials for the bridge at the banks of the Ganga, on his own. It was only after this that SP leader Shivpal Yadav called on him and arranged for administrative approvals for the construction of the bridge.
Here too, claim his followers, Sarkar’s mystic powers had come to display. “During the construction, the engineers faced some problems as the water level in the river swelled. It was Sarkar who prayed before Gangamaiyya that caused the water levels to go down almost suddenly,” says Hari Om, a farmer from the area.
Even as the excavation has so far yielded no gold, it would be extremely hard to miss the backwardness of this cow-belt in India, which forms a favourable backdrop for scientific reasoning to take a backseat.
At the Lucknow airport, cab drivers hesitate to take you beyond the district headquarters of Unnao from where Daudiya Khera is about 70 kilometres. “You want to go to that site where they are digging gold? It is in the interiors. The last stretch of road for 50-60 kilometres is full of pot holes. My car will get damaged. I can drop you till Unnao only,” says one driver, even as half a dozen others refuse to go there as well. True, the road is in a pitiable condition. The nearest hotel from the excavation site is either at Kanpur, which is about 70 kilometres away, or 60 kilometres away in Fatehpur.
The sarkars (governments) at Lucknow and Delhi are conspicuously absent in this downtrodden area. In such a backdrop, if a local sadhu gets the villagers a bridge over the Ganga river, is it any wonder that they revere this seer as their ‘sarkar’ instead?
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