Ravindra Svarupa, a bureaucratic reformer

Kailasa Candra dasa, posted 04 April 2009: […] Since the “GBC” decided to maintain the uttama-adhikari worship of its gurus, and since it decided to expand its diksa fold by the addition of three new commissioners, then this was (allegedly) absolutely. It was supposed to be accepted as Lord Chaitanya’s direct and perfect Will for the expansion of His growing Krishna Consciousness movement, predestined to one day flood the world in an ocean of love of Godhead!

And there, at this time, we find one Sulocana das. He was not a Party Man, but he was dedicated to “ISKCON,” the “GBC,” and the resident Zonal, thinking that they were representing the will of Srila Prabhupada. He was an initiate of Prabhupada, and his chief feeling of responsibility was to His Divine Grace. Sulocana tended the Deities, and was a shaved-up, chipper young man. He was a very good-looking fellow, well-built physically, and he was also a grihastha with two young children. However, he was caught in a conundrum that was becoming more and more common-place within the “ISKCON” confederation.

The female disciples of Prabhupada were almost all torn between following the orders of their resident maha-bhagavat or the orders of the husband as pati-guru. Sulocana emphasized the latter alternative, but his wife did not buy into the proposal. Sometimes the female adherents in the various centers, when they were effective collectors (and most of them were), were provided husbands. This concession was a kind of propitiation given by the Temple President or resident “maha-bhagavat,” a kind of payment up-front, for their continued dedication to bringing home the money (“laxmi”) from the pick. They often felt far more adulation and admiration for the flamboyant, powerful, and charismatic personality of the resident pretender. Most of the husbands were able to tolerate the arrangement in all humility, but Sulocana was in the minority when it came to sharing the allegiance of his wife with a “new guru.” He would not accept it.

The local guru would brook no compromise with him, and Sulocana’s wife was mostly dedicated not to her husband’s orders but to the orders of the resident Zonal Acarya. I know all of this, and I know a great many details more than this in relation to Sulocana, because I got to know him very well. He was a friend of mine. For a number of months in 1985, we traveled together in his van, where I edited many of his manuscripts. The INTERNET did not exist at that time, but Sulocana was at the leading edge of what would soon turn out to be a kind of communication proliferation but a few years later. He had scraped up enough funds to buy a new Commodore computer, monitor, and printer, and he eventually became a kind of fifth wheel. Especially he targeted the Moundsville Zonal in his exposes, because he felt profoundly cheated by this man, the first to mandate uttama-adhikari worship from his own godbrothers and godsisters.

Sulocana eventually tried to kidnap his own two children from the West Virginia compound, but, in his carelessness, he stopped off in Moundsville to pick up some food. He had been tailed, and, when he came out of the grocery store, his two children were now in the custody of henchmen. This infuriated Sulocana, of course, and the odyssey continued with added intensity.

Skipping over a considerable part of the story, Sulocana was murdered, as almost all of you know, by an intimate associate of the leadership at the New Vrindavan cult. He was murdered in 1986 about two miles from the Los Angeles temple. Ironically, from what one of his close associates at that time later told me, he had decided to suspend his campaign against “ISKCON,” the “GBC,” and the Zonal Acarya(s) just a few days previously. Although his original umbrage had been targeted at one pretender, Sulocana–who certainly had a streak of brilliance in him and was a prolific writer in his last years–came to the conclusion that the “GBC” was really the cause of everything horrific that had happened to him during his sojourn from Britain to Moundsville, and especially in the aftermath. He finally had figured it out, and he overcame his sentiments for the so-called Lilamrita also, seeing through the motivations behind its narrative.

Sulocana’s murder should have wound up in Los Angeles’ unsolved homicide division for decades, if not forever, but two devotee friends of his acted immediately upon hearing of it. The hitter was apprehended and convicted. Apparently, he was just a day away from high-tailing it overseas. You can get the details from John Hubner’s book, entitled Monkey On A Stick.

The esoteric fact is that the heinous murder, or you can even say assassination, of Sulocana prabhu, marked the end of a major phase in the Krishna Consciousness movement. Remember, there are two paths of Destiny: Providence and Fate. There is a perfect arrangement made in advance by the Lord to provide the matrices, formatting, and parameters for either one of these two paths to apply going forward. There will be some overlapping that will remain common to both of them, should free will be either used appropriately or misused; this principle applies to individuals as well as movements.

Sulocana’s murder marked the actual end of the Mars dasha for what was, and continued to be, a disintegrating movement. It also indicated the fag end of the First Transformation. There was only a short respite from the turmoil of the early Eighties to these events in the mid-Eighties, generated by the outrage and brilliance of Sulocana. Now, this witch’s brew of “re-initiation” and murder of a protestor was poised to explode into something new and different.

Second Transformation: The Collegial Reformation

The movement slowly began to meltdown in the mid-Eighties. Devotees throughout the world, particularly in America (and even more particularly in the Bay Area) were revolting, and the murder of Sulocana caused almost everyone to step back with a figurative or actual gasp, questioning just how anything that horrific could even happen. The Zonal Acarya pretender maha-bhagavat initiative was running out of steam, being completely rejected by more and more devotees.

This was an ideal moment for the leaders to step back, to question the root of everything since 1978. But the Party Men were not at all willing to go that far. Whenever somebody would contend that the movement needed to return to Square One, the Party Men would individually emote, create a straw man scenario, and falsely claim that any such initiative entailed closing down all of the temples and discontinuing Deity worship; I had personal experience of this. But the older devotees who advocated a return to Square One were simply demanding that all of the concoctions and deviations be removed-root, stalk, and branch–from the movement founded by the Sampradaya Acarya, Srila Prabhupada. This meant recognizing what the recent history was, rectifying all that took place that should not have been allowed to even have gotten its foot in the door, and returning to the true devotional process, free from all contradictions and disobedience to the Acarya.

So, as the movement began an inexorable slide toward the abyss, the radical approach to resolving that disintegration was rejected by the Party Men; they had too much to lose by going that route. Instead, they chose the alternative of “reform,” when only radical steps and real revolution would do. You cannot reform something so corrupt as what “ISKCON” had become by this time through the exigency of superficial changes. However, “ISKCON” had its resourceful Party Men to rely upon, and one of them in the first echelon came through with flying colors.

This false hope was provided by Ravindra Svarupa, the Temple President of the Philadelphia center. He had joined the movement in 1971 and quickly had risen in the ranks. He was a professor-type, and his style was not tainted by any connection to the hippie culture. Instead, he represented the collegial way of doing things, which obviously predominates at universities throughout the world. The American style of collegiate organization, with all of its bureaucratic layers of power, commissions, subcommittees, regents, boards, and emphasis on votes and consensus, would be a change from the tyranny of all power invested in so-called infallible gurus, who proved themselves to be anything but collegial.

Ravindra Svarupa would achieve a guru appointment as but part of his reward for leading what he euphemistically called a revolution. He would later claim that, as leader of this reform, he was obliged to capture the gadi and lead the revolution. However, he was no revolutionary; he was nothing more than a bureaucratic reformer who solidified virtually all of the nescience of the Party Men, simply removing from the scheme its most egregious elements. Nevertheless, his Position Paper, which advocated the necessity of stopping what he called an “internecine war,” caught the imagination of virtually everyone.

It even caught the attention of the Zonal Acaryas. In 1987, TKG removed the vyasasans from all of his temples, indicating that he should only be shown the respect due a madhyama-adhikari. He gave up the pretense of being a God-realized maha-bhagavat, and it was a shrewd move. The chief scribe of the cult almost immediately followed his lead.

Moundsville resisted this momentum, so uttama-adhikari worship of these “acaryas” was not completely repudiated. As an aside, one other of the original eleven is (astoundingly!) reputed, according to published reports on a well-established devotee website, to still be taking uttama-adhikari worship from his Bengali disciples. By 1987, many of the original eleven were gone, including the aforementioned three implicated in sexual trysts (one of the homosexual variety). The Party Men who were not gurus, as could have easily been predicted, transferred their allegiance to “the reform movement” of Ravindra Svarupa.

There was even a half-hearted attempt to judge each of the Zonals in terms of whether or not they could remain on the governing body, and one of them suffered some short-term embarrassment due to this frail and quickly-aborted initiative. When a rich and powerful European Zonal innervated this committee, it backed down. It figured he would take all of his influence, money, and devoted followers with him if he was bounced from the governing body. The whole basis of the reform, viz., to re-enliven the remaining devotees that everything was progressing nicely on a predestined glidepath upwards, would be severely jeopardized if this committee indirectly forced any big devotee out. Ironically, this European Zonal would leave “ISKCON” in a most inimical split about a decade later, anyway.

However, the new collegial spirit did usher in a distinct change from the previous way things went on. Also, it made the movement materially more powerful, because it now had one man who once again exemplified and represented its spirit on the gross plane, viz., Ravindra Svarupa. He was a professor-type. So, when it came to position papers and articles, no one could match him.

No one within the upper echelons of “ISKCON” would dare challenge him, not only because there was little reason to do so, but also because they would face virtually certain defeat in any kind of confrontation-which would be on his terms. The modus operandi of authority and its presentation changed with the Second Transformation. Now the speaker or author who was most proficient at backing up his points and suggestions with sophisticated and scholastic op cits, et als, ibids, and footnotes became the predominating brahmin. Now the “guru who was most proficient at obtaining consensus through party bloc persuasion would be accorded the supermost credit for overcoming the close brush with collapse to promote a new found spirit of compromise . . . er, “cooperation.” Cooperation became the big buzz word in this new transformation.

On the whole, the Zonals couldn’t pull off their high-profile scam anymore, and an “adjustment” was made, in the form of another transformation. It was all “Krishna’s plan.” The Zonals in good standing could keep their initiated disciples, as long as they dropped the maha-bhagavat profile; most cooperated. The current of deviation still ran through this movement, despite the transformation.

As aforementioned, some did not cooperate. One of those had already been excommunicated in 1983, and this divorce was even announced by “ISKCON” in the American press. Separately, the “acarya” who had introduced the uttama-adhikari worship in November of 1977 also rejected the Second Transformation. The “GBC” confronted him, he technically got the best of the debate, but the die had already been cast. The European sahajiya had left to affiliate with Gaudiya Math some years back was found dismembered by one of his own disciples. That horrendous event, also in 1987, did not really shake up the hard-core Party Men, as it was seen as vindication of their institutional position about him.

With the introduction of the Second Transformation, everything was now supposedly honky-dorry in the Krishna Consciousness movement. But those devotees who had the intelligence and vision to see what was actually transpiring knew very well that the real situation was not at all rectified at the deeper levels. Superficially the situation was improved, but the Party Men had, once again, gotten over via this new, big change-which was also completely unauthorized in terms of the parampara. The Second Transformation does not accord with Vedic and Vaishnava tradition relating to the legitimate process and philosophy. Sahajiyas cannot be allowed to keep their so-called initiated disciples if they superficially clean up their act. Pretender maha-bhagavats cannot retroactively be accorded the status of advanced devotees-and know it for a fact that any Vaishnava madhyama-adhikari is an advanced devotee-simply because they jack down the opulence of their worship and say that their godbrothers and godsisters are no longer obliged to also serve and love them as gurus.

If a grifter and pretender rich man is exposed as a complete fraud, he cannot simply cash in all of his ill-gotten gains, claiming falsely that, although he was never the billionaire he advertised himself to be, that he is still a rich man. If he engaged in fraud, he must lose everything. His must be jailed for criminal activities against both national and international laws governing capitalism. But the Party Men, through the agency of their collegiate reform, now claimed that the Way had just been a little misunderstood, had just been a little off-kilter. All was now supposedly set aright and back on track.
Full article:
http://www.harekrsna.com/sun/editorials/04-09/editorials4316.htm