A guru promises to bring a Vedic twist to a tired system.


HARIDWAR, India - The sun slumbered well beneath the horizon, but Swami Ramdev had been up for hours. Swathed in a saffron loincloth, he led his charges, a few hundred devotees in this holy city on the Ganges River and tens of millions more watching on television, through a rapid-fire series of yoga poses.

“If you sweat this much in the morning, you will never get old,” he shouted . His own 50-ish body, lithe and supple as it whipped through the poses, underscored the point.

Without skipping a beat, Swami Ramdev, who as one of India’s most popular and influential gurus has reintroduced yoga to India’s masses, segued seamlessly into his latest passion: politics.

“We clean up our bodies,” he cried. “Then we will clean up our democracy!”

Swami Ramdev plans to do for the body politic what he has already done to the country’s creaky physiques: whip it into shape. He announced recently that he would found a political party that would field candidates for each of the 543 parliamentary seats in India’s next general election in 2014.

“What the people need is honest, brave and responsible leadership,” he said in an interview at the sprawling campus of his rapidly expanding yoga, natural foods and medicine empire in northern India.

The country’s political system is riddled with corruption and riven by the deep divisions of religion and caste, he said. Tapping into the ancient Indian wisdom that gave birth to yoga, and the holy texts like the Vedas and Upanishads, is the only way to excise those cancers, he contended. “We must have a total revolution,” he said.

In some ways Swami Ramdev harks back to India’s earliest leaders with a message of self-reliance, national pride and traditional Indian values. But with his yoga empire and legions of followers on television and the Web, he is also a product and symbol of the New India .

Swami Ramdev says India has relied too much on the system of government it inherited from its British colonizers and lost the traditional systems of governing that held sway for centuries.

“The British didn’t make policies to make the country stronger,” he said. “They made them to extract the maximum resources from the country.”

Multinational corporations have no place in India, he contends. India should be steeped in its own culture.

“Be Indian,” he exhorted his followers on a recent morning. “Speak Indian languages. Wear Indian clothes. Drink Indian drinks.”

All things foreign, he argues, like Coca-Cola and hamburgers, pollute the Indian spirit and weaken it. The World Health Organization is a favorite target: it is, he says, “a big conspiracy” cooked up by American pharmaceutical companies.

Even cricket, India’s beloved national pastime, comes in for criticism as a British import that encourages drinking and immodest ogling of cheerleaders.

He does not plan to run for office himself, he said, and his proposed policies are a hodgepodge. He would fight corruption by making it punishable by death, he said. He would force those hiding billions of dollars abroad in so-called black money, or illegal wealth, to bring that money home to invest in India.

“That loot needs to come home for development,” he said, offering no details on how he might make this happen. “This money will change the whole of the country.”

These views have touched a chord with his followers, many of them from the striving lower middle class who find themselves torn between tradition and the allure of modern life.

“We are very frustrated with the politics of India today,” said Jitender Pratap Singh, a teacher who attended a yoga session with the swami here. He voted for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in the last election, but was eager to join the swami’s party.

“I want change for the next generation,” he said. “Yoga can rescue India.”

Some religious leaders here said they were glad to see the swami dip a toe in politics. Digambar Jitender Puri, 36, a sadhu, or holy man, attending the Kumbh Mela festival recently on the banks of the Ganges River here, said Swami Ramdev was doing important work.

“He is thinking in the right direction and talking about the problems of the nation like corruption, poverty, economy,” Mr. Jitender said. “I think he will succeed.”

But other holy men were skeptical. “Ramdev is a successful yogi, but politics will puncture him,” said Sri Nityanand Puri. “God has given him some gifts, but his ego will finish him.”

The hurly-burly of politics is no place for holy men, he said.

“He thinks that he can fix all the wrongs,” Mr. Nityanand said. “He will be consumed by the dirt of politics.”


By LYDIA POLGREEN


Swami Ramdev says his goal is to cleanse Indian politics.