Tax-exempting Patanjali Yogpeeth is achhe din for Hindutva capitalism
The things that get tax relief under any regime pretty much hold out an open door to that particular government’s core beliefs. While India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru emphasised setting up and public funding of the IITs as centres of learning and excellence, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi we have Baba Ramdev’s brand of yogic research getting a lion’s share of government largesse.
As reports suggest, the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT) has gifted “tax exempt” status to Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali Yogpeeth, supposedly a “public charitable trust”, but in reality - in fact it’s hardly a secret - the very nucleus of the yoga guru’s Rs 5,000-crore and growing FMCG empire. Patanjali Yogpeeth, incorporated in 2009 in Haridwar, is a sprawling mega institution employing over 350 “research scholars”, and thousands of staff overseeing the retail operations of Patanjali Ayurved Ltd, the major new entrant in the fast-moving consumer goods sector.
Dubbing Patanjali Yogpeeth as a “charitable trust” because it involves yoga and participates in “medical relief”, as cited by the ITAT, is as bogus as equating Patanjali with an exercise in harmless spirituality, even though the seamless fusion of religion, yoga, wellness, fitness, business, education, politics and nationalism is something that’s staring us in the face.
But the tax break is not just about facilitating Patanjali, which has Baba Ramdev as the “free brand ambassador”, and Acharya Balakrishna as the managing director with a net worth of $ 2.5 billion, as estimated by Forbes in 2016. It is not just akin to giving Gautam Adani Rs 100 crore from the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund, or allowing a controversial billion-dollar loan from the State Bank of India to the Adani Group for their environmentally hazardous, politically compromised mining project in Carmichael, Australia.
The tax-exempt status to Patanjali Yogpeeth is far more insidious than the simplistic continuation of crony capitalism and governmental nepotism, which the Narendra Modi regime has made an example of already. What Patanjali Yogpeeth stands for and the overt government backing that it receives is in reality a heady concoction of toxic nationalism and fake science channelised as a Hindu economic and political revival, a redefinition of the secular idea of India by replacing it with a Hindutva-laced pseudo-spiritualism that can be bottled and sold to millions of vulnerable Indians.
Nucleus of Ramdev's FMCG empire
Let’s look at what Patanjali Yogpeeth is really about and how it has mushroomed subsidiaries and "researched" supposedly Ayurvedic recipes now sold across the length and breadth of India as herbal medicines, herbal cosmetics, health supplements, soaps and toiletries, even skinny jeans and hundreds of other FMCG products, including the recently launched edible oil under the brand name Patanjali Refined.
In its remarkable cover story on Ramdev in July last year, India Today magazine detailed how Patanjali Yogpeeth is at the heart of the yoga guru and business baron’s FMCG dominion, which is witnessing over 100 per cent annual growth and is eyeing occupying at least “one-third of India’s FMCG sector by 2020, amounting to almost Rs one lakh crore”, according to the candid Ramdev himself. Exactly how the very nerve centre of an exponentially growing kingdom of consumer goods becomes the beneficiary of tax break is mind-boggling, to say the least.
Marketed at prices which are far lower than its competitors, or taking advantage of controversies that appear all-too-concocted in hindsight, such as the MSG scare in Nestle’s Maggi noodles, Patanjali has made a dent in others’ shares in the FMCG sector that has become the hot topic of discussion among business and political analysts. This bending of market economics and initial offering of the products at prices substantially lower than the rest, or almost free of cost (for example, the free data and voice-call offer on Reliance Jio SIMs until March 31, 2017) as an integral part of nation-building is something that is becoming commonplace under the Narendra Modi regime.
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| Photo: DailyO |
Linked to his “anti-corruption” crusade, which took off during the Lokpal movement in 2011, but was stunted when he was caught trying to escape in a salwar kameez at a police crackdown at Delhi Ramlila Maidan, to his overt support of Narendra Modi during the latter’s 2012 Gujarat Assembly election campaign, or the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, Baba Ramdev’s cultural sway on India grew by leaps and bounds, and corresponded with Narendra Modi’s meteoric rise as the only “strong national leader”.
But the kernel of the yoga guru’s business of spirituality, that’s merged flawlessly with the materialism of consumer goods that promise male offspring (Putrajeevak) or profess curing homosexuality via bodily and mental cleansing, is Patanjali Yogpeeth, a parallel universe of pseudoscience that is increasingly endangering genuine scientific research in the country.
Much like the seminar in IIT Delhi on the medical miracle that’s “panchagavya”, a concoction involving cow urine, dung, is a symptom of a much larger malaise festering in India’s education sector, the tax-exempt status to Patanjali Yogpeeth has enormous symbolic value. This, however, under a government which has the AYUSH ministry and a prime minister who causes national embarrassment by citing Ganesh’s elephant head as an example of plastic surgery in “Vedic India”, is not unexpected.
Yogpeeth in the long run
But that doesn’t mean it mustn’t be opposed. While Patanjali’s FMCG ambitions are hardly a national secret, thinking that the Yogpeeth’s enormous spawning of unsubstantiated, bogus recipes as the portal to mental and physical wellness will be limited to the consumer goods sector, is deluded and myopic, to say the least.
It is already in public domain that Baba Ramdev, who has a curious, bitter-sweet relationship with the RSS and the educational overhaul that the Sangh wants to engineer in line with Hindu nationalism and its poisonous shakha dogma, had floated the idea of a Vedic Education Board, to rival CBSE. Though turned down by the former Union HRD minister Smriti Irani, ostensibly under RSS' directions, the Vedic Education Board is awaiting governmental nod and is expecting clearance when the time is ripe.
Ramdev’s own ideological influences, including Dayanand Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda, and other stalwarts of the colonial-era martial Hindutva, mean that the swadeshi revivalism that the yoga guru envisions, is going to be a peculiar brand of neoliberal nativism, enjoying the fringe benefits of endorsing regularly a strongman leader who himself is party to such grand neonationalist projects.
Patanjali Yogpeeth is the interphase where the Sangh worldview meets the messier ground reality of a hitherto diverse Indian market, but where feelings of being let down by corruption and being inundated with “western capitalism” are carefully fused with a Hindu swadeshi identity. No wonder then that in 2014, barely months after Modi’s election as the prime minister, did even the premier DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organisation) decide to avail Patanjali products and build upon its nationalistic credentials.
We need to see Patanjali Yogpeeth as one of the crucial laboratories where the Ramdev-RSS-Modi-BJP and affiliated ideologies are incubated and turned into consumable goods. Everything that Ramdev does to promote Patanjali – such as mock-wrestling with a 2008 Olympic silver medalist, or giving interviews to various media outlets to propagate his ideas on yoga, Ayurveda, celibacy, austerity, no premarital sex, homosexuality, nationalism, patriotism, Narendra Modi, India’s civilisational Hindu-ness, etc. – is linked to the wider movement of reconfiguring the idea of India into something completely different from what it has been for a pretty long time.
Tax-exempt status for Patanjali Yogpeeth is therefore less about facilitated tax avoidance as it is about gaining the necessary cultural and political capital to be a formidable player in shaping the neo-Hindu India of 21st century: A country of terribly insular ideas about science and education, a country of publicly funded, nationalist regression, a place where rampant quackery has a newfound political sanction, a place where conning gullible masses is now government-aided, with tax breaks.
Sad, but hardly unexpected.