The Hindu nation was fake. But its land grab in Bolivia was real

New Delhi: They call themselves emissaries of the world's first "sovereign nation" for Hindus, with its own passports and "cosmic constitution." They claim to have created an official currency in sacred gold, managed by a "reserve bank."

Representatives of this nonexistent country have given statements at UN events and posed for photos with global statesmen, American members of Congress and the mayor of Newark, New Jersey. Their leader, a fugitive holy man, professes to be able to guide the process of reincarnation, guaranteeing that billionaires who use his services won't be paupers in the next life.

But the self-proclaimed United States of Kailasa has now collided with reality.

Last week, officials in Bolivia said they had arrested 20 people associated with Kailasa, accusing them of "land trafficking" after they negotiated 1,000-year leases with Indigenous groups for swaths of the Amazon.

The agreements were declared void, and the Kailasans were deported -- not to Kailasa, but to their actual home countries, among them India, the United States, Sweden and China.

"Bolivia does not maintain diplomatic relations with the alleged nation 'United States of Kailasa,'" Bolivia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. Kailasa's "press office of the Holy See of Hinduism" did not respond to requests for comment.

The bizarre story of Kailasa stretches back at least to 2019, when the guru known as Swami Nithyananda -- aka His Divine Holiness, the Supreme Pontiff of Hinduism -- fled India after being accused of rape, torture and child abuse.

Born Arunachalam Rajasekaran in southern India, he became a Hindu monk and started his first ashram in his 20s near the tech hub of Bengaluru. He quickly built an empire across India and in cities around the world.

Nithyananda was also grandiose, linking himself to long religious and royal lineages. He claimed miracle powers, like helping the blind see through a "third eye" or delaying the sunrise by 40 minutes.

"I am a totality of unknown in your life. I'm the manifest of un-manifest," he said in one sermon. "The moment you sit in front of me, enlightenment starts."

During a conversation in front of a large crowd, he endorsed the idea of "the world's first inter-life reincarnation trust management." Rich people like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett could invest a few billion dollars in a trust; Nithyananda said he possessed the knowledge system to ensure they got the money when they were reborn.

That would be important, Nithyananda's interlocutor said, "because it is possible Bill Gates will be born very poor, Warren Buffett may be born in some African village as a very poor guy."

When the accusations of rape and sexual assault started piling up and the government went after Nithyananda, he claimed that the cases were an anti-Hindu conspiracy "to grab my land."

It is not clear where he went after fleeing India, but reports put him in South America or the Caribbean. A couple of years later, he resurfaced with the declaration that he had founded the United States of Kailasa, which he said was the revival of past Hindu kingdoms.

The new nation's website -- where "free e-citizenship" is just a few clicks away -- said its sovereign lands were "in the Andean region." Nithyananda, who is now in his late 40s, was upfront about the benefits the location offered.

"Many people asked me, 'Swami ji, why did you leave such a huge empire you built in India and are sitting in a corner?" he says in a video, referring to himself using an Indian honorific. The answer, he said, was "immunity" that made him "non-prosecutable" as the head of his own state.

Since then, Kailasa had popped up now and again when its emissaries caused embarrassment for politicians around the world.

In 2023, a senior official in Paraguay resigned after he had signed a memorandum of understanding with Kailasa. Earlier that year, the mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, rescinded a sister cities agreement with the fictitious nation days after holding a ceremony announcing the partnership.

In Bolivia, the Kailasa followers, who officials said had arrived on tourist visas, managed a photo with the country's president, Luis Arce. There is no evidence that Nithyananda joined them there.

Scandal erupted after an investigation by the Bolivian newspaper El Deber revealed the leases that the Kailasans had signed with Indigenous groups in the Amazon.

Pedro Guasico, a leader of the Baure, one of the groups, said its contact with the Kailasa emissaries had begun late last year, when they arrived offering help after forest fires.

The conversations eventually turned to a lease of land three times the size of New Delhi, and the Baure agreed to a 25-year deal that would supposedly have paid them nearly $200,000 annually. But when the Kailasa representatives came back with a draft in English, it covered 1,000 years and included the use of air space and the extraction of natural resources.

Guasico said his group signed anyway. "We made the mistake of listening to them," he said by phone. "They offered us that money as an annual bonus for conserving and protecting our territory, but it was completely false."