The anointment of Swami Nityanand as mahamandaleshwar by the Mahanirvani akhara has triggered off a major controversy at the Maha Kumbh at Prayag. The seer earned the sobriquet of “sex swami” after his lewd footage with a Tamil actress was aired on a TV channel in March 2010.
He had fled his ‘ashram’ in Karnataka for a long time before being arrested from Solan in Himachal Pradesh.
The swami is reported to have been given the title of mahamandaleshwar at a hush-hush ceremony on Tuesday evening. The prestigious title is conferred on a sadhu-mahant in the presence of high priests from all the 13 akharas. However, no such prominent priests were invited for this ceremony. Several other akharas have already started raising their voice against this alleged act of misdemeanor.
“The manner in which this has been done is totally against traditions and completely unacceptable,” says Narendra Giri, Sri Mahant of the Niranjani akhara. He said it was a must for representatives from the other ‘akharas’ to have been present for the formal recognition of the mahamandaleshwar title. He also objected to the “surreptitious” manner in which the anointment ceremony was conducted and asserted that Nityanand did not deserve the title in the first place due to his dubious antecedents.
However, Sri Mahant Ravindra Puri of Mahanirvani akhara justifies the move saying the ‘akhara’ had all the right to confer the title of ‘mahamandaleshwar’ at its discretion. He also told reporters that for long there had been complaints that seers from the south were not given place in the akharas, and this was just an attempt to address that grievance.