By Sharanya Gopinathan

Godmen will never cease to surprise you. Or infuriate you.

Back when a case of sexual assault was registered against self-styled godman ‘Swami’ Nithyananda by a former devotee in 2010, he told the Criminal Investigation Department that he could not possibly be guilty of the crime as he was “impotent”. Impotent, by the way, is a word that is supposed to mean a man is physically unable to have penetrative sexual intercourse or experience an erection or orgasm, but instead sounds like some sort of inane measure of masculine power or “potency” based on the strength of one’s erection or explosiveness of orgasm.

Anyway, after evading medical tests for four years, he was ordered to undergo a “potency” test by a Supreme Court order in 2012, which he finally did in 2014 after two years of evasion. When he finally took the test, it was obviously and immediately revealed that he was not, in fact, “impotent” (we’ll get to the bizarre reason why this seemed obvious in just a bit).

Now, Nithyananda has amazingly claimed that the sexual intercourse which took place between him and a female devotee was in fact consensual! It’s such a huge and audacious departure from and leap in logic, but then again, perhaps that is what godmen are most famous for.

Doesn’t it remind you of the time the rapist Dera Sacha Sauda leader Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh told the court that he, too, couldn’t be guilty of sexual assault because he was god-like and impotent? It was a claim I remember the court immediately smacking down, asking irritably how his biological daughters with his wife Harjeet Kaur, Charnpreet and Amarpreet Insan, were born.

The Nithyananda case, with this new and desperate twist, has of course now turned even nastier. Now that they’re trying to make the sexual assault seem like consensual sex, Nithyananda’s lawyers are doing their damnedest to smear the victim’s character in the most vile way they know. So far, they’ve told the court that the devotee is an educated NRI who has had multiple sexual partners, wanted to sleep with Nithyananda in order to receive spiritual bliss and that she has an STI!

I would yawn at his lawyer’s lack of imagination if it wasn’t so illegal. As Constitutional lawyer Akila Ramalingam pointed out to The News Minute, after the passing of the Evidence Act in 2003, it is now totally illegal to reference a victim’s sexual life and history in a case of sexual assault. Why did the court allow these kind of statements to be made, and will they go down in the record and influence the outcome of this case?

The reference to “spiritual bliss” is, of course, particularly loaded, and brings us back to why it was always so laughably improbable that Nithyananda was impotent. In the immediate aftermath of the case being filed against Nithyananda, it came to light that he had made several of his devotees sign non-disclosure agreements and what basically amounts to a “sex contract”.

A special set of chosen devotees were made to sign this contract (many of them later told media houses that they had no idea what they were signing, and merely did so out of blind faith in the godman). The contract specified that the signatories consented to “the learning and practice of ancient tantric secrets associated with male and female ecstasy, including the use of sexual energy for increased intimacy/spiritual connection, pleasure, harmony, and freedom” and that “these activities could be physically and mentally challenging, and may involve nudity, access to visual images, graphic visual depictions, and descriptions of nudity and sexual activity, close physical proximity and intimacy, verbal and written descriptions and audio sounds of a sexually oriented, and erotic nature, etc.”

This does not sound at all like a contract framed by an “impotent” man, but I wonder if this reference to spiritual bliss, very similar to the language in this bizarre ‘agreement’, is preparing the Court for the argument that the victim indicated her consent to the sexual assault by signing this contract. Ugh, vaanthi-max.