Tamil Nadu police get pro-active on sex scandal
No complaint registered either against swami or actress
The Tamil Nadu police is getting more proactive on complaints pertaining to Swami Paramahamsa Nithyananda at the heart of a sex scandal allegedly with actress Ranjitha, as different sorts of complaints surface against the godman’s alleged misdemeanors, forcing a State response.
Though there has been no complaint either against the swami or Ranjitha, or from any directly affected party, the lawyers here feel that the ‘cheating case’ registered against the godman on a plea by a group of Madras High Court lawyers, might not stand legal scrutiny. The police are leaving no stone unturned.
Chief Minister M Karunanidhi’s statement on Thursday that the Government will not be a mute spectator if spiritual gurus in ashrams play the “saint by day and turn cupid’s arrow by night”, in an oblique reference to the Nithyananda sleaze tapes, has given the green signal to the police to pursue specifics to their logical end, sources said.
The Coimbatore City Police, in particular, are now looking for Ranjitha’s whereabouts to ‘interrogate her’, taking the freely available CDs in the grey market ‘as itself a basis for action’, sources in the Textile city said. This follows a complaint by Vishwanathan of Coimbatore to the city police commissioner demanding Nithyananda’s arrest and freezing his assets, as his alleged brazen action has hurt the religious sentiments of people, and seeking action under Sec 420 IPC (cheating).
Parents appeal
In another curious turn, parents of two inmates from Tamil Nadu staying at Swami Nithyananda’s ashram in Bangalore, one from Tiruchirappalli and another from Manali New Town in North Chennai, have urged the respective police commissioners to take steps to safely bring back their sons from the ashram, in the wake of the sex scandal.
The parents of these two boys have alleged that the ashram people in Bangalore had locked them up and fear worse things could happen. The Tamil Nadu police have activated investigations into these complaints too.
The whereabouts of Swami Nithyananda are still not clear. His lawyer, M Shreedhar told Deccan Herald here on Friday that they will contest the cheating (IPC Section 420) complaints as ‘nobody has said what exactly the cheating is’.
“We have not even been given the FIR in this case,” the lawyer alleged. There is also no word yet on Lenin Karuppan alias Dharmananda, a former inmate of the ashram and the alleged villain of the piece who has been spreading defamatory things about the swami, according to counsel Shreedhar.
Lenin, accused of being versatile in morphing images, had allegedly begun blackmailing Nithyananda, the godman has claimed in his suit in the city civil court. The Sun TV Network and a few other Tamil publications are cited as respondents in this suit. Nithyananda is expected to appear in public after Kumbh Mela in Varanasi on March 18, his lawyer added.
There was also no firm word yet on a police party from Karnataka having visited Thiruvannamalai, the birth place of Nithyananda, in a bid to nab the godman, Superintendent of Police Pandiyan told Deccan Herald over phone in the evening.
