Mahant of ashrams in 4 states arrested. Girl said he raped her for 18 months

JAIPUR: A mahant who heads five ashrams in four states has been arrested on charges of raping a 17-year-old over the past 18 months in Rajasthan’s Bhilwara district, police said on Thursday.

The accused, identified by the police as Mahant Sarjudas, was arrested on Wednesday in Bhilwara, 250km south of state capital Jaipur, the district’s additional superintendent of police Govardhan Lal said.

The police officer said the mahant, or head priest, consumed a substance as soon as he was arrested from his Bhilwara ashram for alleged sexual assault under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act and and fell unconscious. He was immediately taken to a hospital. Mahant Sarjudas was produced before a judge on Thursday and remanded in judicial custody.

Lal said a 17-year-old girl recently filed a first information report (FIR) against the mahant, accusing him of raping her on multiple ocassions during the last one-and-a-half years after her mother faced an acid attack. The mother suspected that the mahant of the ashram where she sent her daughter was behind the attack.

The girl broke down and told her mother, and later the police, about the multiple instances of rape that she suffered for months.

Sarjudas was arrested after a police team conducted the preliminary investigation to confirm the allegations levelled by the teenager, he said..

The senior district police officer said Sarjudas, who also has ashrams in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh’s Ayodhya and Uttarakhand’s Badrinath, would assign tasks to other children in the ashram and allegedly rape the girl when the other children got busy.

Lal said the girl first spoke about her ordeal to a friend a few months back. The officer said a police team reached out to the friend to cross-check her version. The friend verified that the girl did confine in her about the sexual assault.