Ānanda Mārga: The sect New Zealand forgot

By Bronwyn Rideout

Source| Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar

As Mark and I continue to chip away at the NZ Skeptical Calendar project, my search for fringe groups in the Papers Past database introduced me to Ānanda Mārga (The Path of Bliss or officially,Ānanda Mārga Pracāraka Saṃgha). The groups had an absolutely wild time in New Zealand and Australia throughout the 1970s before they disappeared from the archives, resurfacing intermittently when their humanitarian efforts were being promoted. Ānanda Mārga came to New Zealand in 1974 and soon there were groups in each major New Zealand city; they even operated a health food shop in Nelson.

The sect was founded by railway accounts clerk Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar (Spiritual name of Shrii Shrii Anandamurti) in East Bengal in 1955. He was seen by his members as having supernatural gifts and viewed by followers and the embodiment of god.

It is a socio-spiritual group that claims to teach scientific practices of self-development alongside formal, global social service and disaster relief. There are three dimensions to their teachings: tantra yoga (not the sexier, western interpreted neo-tantra), meditation, and social service. However, the practical discipline of Ānanda Mārga (AM) practice is outlined in what are known as the Sixteen Points which given direction on maintaining cleanliness, reducing stimulation to the genitals, how to bathe, what to eat, participation in group activities (i.e. meditation) and so forth. There are three levels of membership: Those who devote their lives to the organisation and to teaching others are called Acharyas, followed by full-time workers who stay local, and finally margis which are initiated members who maintain employment outside of the sect.

Under the Ānanda Mārga umbrella are several organisations which address the groups human service goals including the Ananda Marga Universal Relief team (AMURT) and their by-women-for-women counterpart (AMURTEL) as well as the Renaissance Artists and Writers Association, which promotes art as a method of self-realisation and had a storefront on Cuba street back in the early 80s.

In 1959, Sakar expanded his work into the socio-economic sphere with his Progressive Utilization Theory (PROUT). Envisioned as a middle ground between capitalism and communism, resources were collective property and a baseline distribution of goods which promises food, clothing, education, and medical care to all. Nation states would be replaced with a world government while a decentralised economy would be managed by locally governed socio-economic zones. Sarkar specifically rejected terrorism but acknowledged that revolutionary actions would take place in order to end exploitative conditions or regimes and in some contexts, violent action was necessary.

So far, so benign, right?

PROUT is seen by many outsiders to the sect as virulently anti-marxist and radically political. This stance made them natural adversaries to the Communist Party of India and it is alleged that it was a group of communists that killed five AM members in 1965 in Bengal. Its anti-corruption stance also did not make the AM sect any friends within the Indira Gandhi-led government at the time. In 1971, there was an internal schism when Sakar's wife and his private secretary, along with several dissatisfied followers left. She and others accused Sakar of murdering at least eighteen followers, coercing female adherents to have sex with him by claiming that they were wives in past lives, and forcing male minors to engage in sex acts.That summer, six corpses were discovered in the jungle near the AM headquarters and were disfigured in a manner that made identification impossible. Police raided Ananda Marga headquarters and claimed to have found six skulls and a cache of weapons which included bloodstained daggers. The chief of AMs Voluntary Social Service confessed to killing eighteen defectors on Sakar's orders. On June 1, 1971, Sakar was charged with conspiracy to commit murder. In 1973, Sakar was allegedly poisoned during his incarceration and after his recovery, demanded an inquest. With no investigation forthcoming, Sakar fasted (well, to be exact, drank only a glass of buttermilk each day) until his release 5 years later. On July 4th, 1975, Ananda Marga was one of many groups banned when Indira Gandhi proclaimed a state of emergency that lasted until 1977.

For several years after his arrest, practitioners internationally protested for his release. Some actions were non-violent; several protest fasts were held in major New Zealand cities including repeated sit-ins at Cathedral Square Christchurch, Nelson, and Wellington. Other forms of actions were decidedly violent. In April 1973, a monk burned to death in New Delhi in a suspected case of self-immolation, although local police claimed that the monk had been drugged and set alight by fellow AM members. An Australian follower also immolated herself in Geneva in 1978. In New Zealand, Constable N. Sawyer was kidnapped by three sect members at gunpoint after he and a fellow police officer were investigating a burglary at Horokiwi Quarries on October 3rd, 1975. The sect members absconded with Sawyer in a police vehicle before abandoning both in Petone. The perpetrators were soon caught as the stolen vehicle was being followed by police and they were jailed, along with the sect's New Zealand leader, Italian-born Concilio Fabrizio in November 1975. The sect went into damage control by distancing itself from these actions and claiming that the perpetrators were no longer members of the organisation.

From there it seemed like Ānanda Mārga was playing a cat and mouse game with immigration, bringing leaders and teachers in as quickly as the Department of Immigration could deport them. In November 1975, Martin Tobias (aka Archarya Dharma Pala) was handed a deportation order by the Detective Sergeant G Sawyer, brother of the kidnapped officer; he had arrived in the country on a one month tourist visa before being granted a six month visitor's permit. Top AM nun Ellen Merkel travelled from Taiwan to NZ to personally offer an apology to Prime Minister Rowling for the bomb plot but seemed to only exacerbate heightened safety concerns as assassination threats had been made against Rowling. Merkel eventually left without meeting the Prime Minister.

The group's acting president, Steve Radich, later admitted that he had been asked to kidnap Rowling by an AM leader who was in Mount Crawford Prison awaiting trial. When Fabrizio and another AM monk were deported, Norwegian AM leader Eric Fossum (aka Acharya Arun Brahmacarii) exploited an immigration loophole to garner a six-month visitor's visa even though his intent was to work as a yoga teacher and spiritual advisor. Fossum's arrival contravened an agreement Immigration supposedly had with the Australian AM headquarters which required a written application if AM wished to send teachers to New Zealand. Fossum was soon asked to leave.

American Acharya Abhiik Kumara visited New Zealand at this time. Unlike his predecessors, Kumara had Australian citizenship and took advantage of the reciprocal entry arrangement both countries enjoy but interestingly, Kumara had been forced out of NZ in 1975. Fossum was officially replaced by an Australian teacher named Dada Narada Muni and also noted that his Australian citizenship gave him the right to enter without Immigration permission and to stay indefinitely. However, the strategy for using Australians did not last long and in 1979, when the head of the New Zealand branch, Timothy Thomas Hilton Jones was sentenced for conspiring with another AM member to apply for a passport with fraudulent intent.

Further bad luck faced Kiwi AM members abroad. Richard White, a British engineering student from Auckland University who was married to a New Zealander, was detained with an Australian man in India in 1975 on suspicion of participating in subversive activities and for assault on a police officer - White and friend had made an unsuccessful attempt to escape police custody after a prolonged interrogation by Calcutta police. Both men were freed in June 1976.

Source | Workers cleaning up after the Sydney Hilton bombing

AM members were high on the list of suspects for any act of international terrorism or violence against the sitting Indian government, including an Air India explosion and threats of assassination of diplomats abroad. In between 1977 to 1978, several incidents occurred throughout Australia, including the stabbing of a military attache at the Indian High Commission in Canberra in his bed, which led to travel bans for AM members or associates trying to enter Australia.

What is likely the best known event is the alleged involvement of AM members in the bombing of the Sydney Hilton in February 1978 while the Commonwealth Heads of government were meeting; it was believed that the target was the Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai; a few months later, a supposed break in the case occur when police intercept a car with Ananada Marga members on their way to bomb the house of the leader of the ultra-right wing National Front. However, the prosecution of this case is marred by claims for and against a conspiracy headed by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the overwhelmingly negative public perception of AM. The details of which are out of the scope of this article but are worthy of independent reading.

Sakar was eventually given a retrial and acquitted of all charges in August 1978. In 1979, he undertook two world tours but both Australian and New Zealand governments refused to issue entry visas to the guru. New Zealand followers decided not to fast to the death as their Australian counterparts did.

At this point, most media records regarding AM and New Zealand drop off. Many journalists note that once Sakar was released, antagonistic actions seemed to reduce dramatically. However, AM and NZ do collide in 1995 when a “Kim Davy” allegedly conducted an unauthorised arms drop in West Bengal to Ananda Marga groups in the area. Indian Air Force planes were successful in forcing the plane to land and take the suspect into custody but they were less successful in keeping the man under surveillance and Kim Davy gave his captors the slip. However, police soon discovered that the New Zealand passport used by the gunrunner was under the identity of a baby who died in 1962.

Since the Purulia arms drop, Ananda Marga has remained controversy free and kept a low profile unless it is to advertise their humanitarian projects. The Progressive Party of Aotearoa, led by one-time Ananda Marga spokesperson Bruce Dyer, has campaigned to apply PROUT in New Zealand. Otherwise, their social media and official websites in NZ have been quiet since 2020.