logo
The Hindu Nation Was Fake. But Its Land Grab in Bolivia Was Real.

The Hindu Nation Was Fake. But Its Land Grab in Bolivia Was Real.

New York Times03-04-2025
They call themselves emissaries of the world's first 'sovereign nation' for Hindus, with its own passports and 'cosmic constitution.' They claim to have created an official currency in sacred gold, managed by a 'reserve bank.'
Representatives of this nonexistent country have given statements at U.N. events and posed for photos with global statesmen, American congressmen and the mayor of Newark. Their leader, a fugitive holy man, professes to be able to guide the process of reincarnation, guaranteeing that billionaires who use his services won't be paupers in the next life.
But the self-proclaimed United States of Kailasa has now collided with reality.
Last week, officials in Bolivia said they had arrested 20 people associated with Kailasa, accusing them of 'land trafficking' after they negotiated 1,000-year leases with Indigenous groups for swathes of the Amazon.
The agreements were declared void, and the Kailasans were deported — not to Kailasa, but to their actual home countries, among them India, the United States, Sweden and China.
'Bolivia does not maintain diplomatic relations with the alleged nation 'United States of Kailasa,'' Bolivia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. Kailasa's 'press office of the Holy See of Hinduism' did not respond to requests for comment.
The bizarre story of Kailasa stretches back at least to 2019, when the guru known as Swami Nithyananda — a.k.a. His Divine Holiness, the Supreme Pontiff of Hinduism — fled India after being accused of rape, torture and child abuse.
Born Arunachalam Rajasekaran in southern India, he became a Hindu monk and started his first ashram in his 20s near the tech hub of Bengaluru. He quickly built an empire across India and in cities around the world.
Nithyananda was also grandiose, linking himself to long religious and royal lineages. He claimed miracle powers, like helping the blind see through a 'third eye' or delaying the sunrise by 40 minutes.
'I am a totality of unknown in your life. I'm the manifest of un-manifest,' he said in one sermon. 'The moment you sit in front of me, enlightenment starts.'
During a conversation in front of a large crowd, he endorsed the idea of 'the world's first inter-life reincarnation trust management.' Rich people like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett could invest a few billion dollars in a trust; Nithyananda said he possessed the knowledge system to ensure they got the money when they were reborn.
That would be important, Nithyananda's interlocutor said, 'because it is possible Bill Gates will be born very poor, Warren Buffett may be born in some African village as a very poor guy.'
When the accusations of rape and sexual assault started piling up and the government went after Nithyananda, he claimed that the cases were an anti-Hindu conspiracy 'to grab my land.'
It is not clear where he went after fleeing India, but reports put him in South America or the Caribbean. A couple of years later, he resurfaced with the declaration that he had founded the United States of Kailasa, which he said was the revival of past Hindu kingdoms.
The new nation's website — where 'free e-citizenship' is just a few clicks away — said its sovereign lands were 'in the Andean region.' Nithyananda, who is now in his late 40s, was up front about the benefits the location offered.
'Many people asked me, 'Swami ji, why did you leave such a huge empire you built in India and are sitting in a corner?' he says in a video, referring to himself using an Indian honorific. The answer, he said, was 'immunity' that made him 'non-prosecutable' as the head of his own state.
Since then, Kailasa had popped up now and again when its emissaries caused embarrassment for politicians around the world.
In 2023, a senior official in Paraguay resigned after he had signed a memorandum of understanding with Kailasa. Earlier that year, the mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, rescinded a sister cities agreement with the fictitious nation days after holding a ceremony announcing the partnership.
In Bolivia, the Kailasa followers, who officials said had arrived on tourist visas, managed a photo with the country's president, Luis Arce. There is no evidence that Nithyananda joined them there.
Scandal erupted after an investigation by the Bolivian newspaper El Deber revealed the leases that the Kailasans had signed with Indigenous groups in the Amazon.
Pedro Guasico, a leader of the Baure, one of the groups, said its contact with the Kailasa emissaries had begun late last year, when they arrived offering help after forest fires.
The conversations eventually turned to a lease of land three times the size of New Delhi, and the Baure agreed to a 25-year deal that would supposedly have paid them nearly $200,000 annually. But when the Kailasa representatives came back with a draft in English, it covered 1,000 years and included the use of air space and the extraction of natural resources.
Mr. Guasico said his group signed anyway. 'We made the mistake of listening to them,' he said by phone. 'They offered us that money as an annual bonus for conserving and protecting our territory, but it was completely false.'
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

The ‘woke right' free-trade critics are only fooling themselves
The ‘woke right' free-trade critics are only fooling themselves

New York Post

timea few seconds ago

  • New York Post

The ‘woke right' free-trade critics are only fooling themselves

Capitalism gets a lot of hate. I expect it from the left. They blame free markets for racism, 'horrifying inequality' and even, according to economist Joseph Stiglitz, 'accelerating climate change.' People on the right generally defend capitalism, but today, a growing number agree with the left. Advertisement Author James Lindsay says, 'They make the exact same arguments that we've heard for decades: 'capitalism has made everything about the dollar. Everything's about GDP . . . you lose everything that really matters, like kinship and nation and identity.' ' Tucker Carlson, who Lindsay calls 'woke right,' praises Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren's economic programs, saying they 'make obvious sense.' 'Astonishing!' says Lindsay. Advertisement 'Warren put forth something called the 'Accountable Capitalism Act,' which was going to restrain the way that corporations are able to behave under the brand name of 'accountability'.' Even Vice President JD Vance attacks free trade. 'While the government shouldn't be controlling the American economy,' Vance said, 'we should . . . put a little bit of a thumb on the scale . . . protect nascent industries from foreign competition.' That is 'just another way of saying, 'your company got too big, so we need to take some of your property and distribute it further down the chain,'' says Lindsay. Advertisement The veep is 'very against large multinational corporations and the things that they do and wants to limit them.' But why? Large companies get large mostly by doing things right. Businesses don't make profits unless they please their customers. Look at places that mostly embrace free markets — the United States, Singapore, Switzerland, New Zealand and Hong Kong (until China's government clamped down). Advertisement These are good places to live. People prosper when markets are free. 'It works!' says Lindsay. 'When you have free people who can engage freely with one another and trade . . . you actually have a rising of all ships. Because what you have is a people who are free to do with their things as they will. 'They, therefore, can implement their stuff, their money, their resources, their talents, whatever they happen to be, to solve problems for other people. And when you solve a problem for other people, even if it's a kind of silly thing, like entertaining them with a silly game on their phone, when you solve a problem for other people, they'll give you money for it in exchange.' Exactly: Trade is win-win. Otherwise, we wouldn't engage in it. So it puzzles me that as markets continue to lift more people out of poverty, capitalism faces more attacks — even from the right. 'The problem,' says Lindsay, is 'it requires people to be free . . . You can't control people who are free. 'So we need to have a government system to tell them to do the right thing in the name of the common good. That's the mentality.' Advertisement Get opinions and commentary from our columnists Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters Lindsay once hoaxed a conservative magazine, American Reformer, into publishing part of the 'Communist Manifesto,' merely by substituting Christian nationalist language for words like 'proletariat.' When the editors learned that they'd been tricked, they left the article up, saying it was 'a reasonable aggregation of some New Right ideas.' Advertisement Yikes. Government-managed trade, protection for politically connected industries, state promotion of Christianity, speech restrictions, morality laws, state-owned industry, cronyism — these are bad ideas, no matter which side sells them. John Stossel is the author of 'Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.'

Rogan hits Patel over Epstein claims: ‘Doesn't make any sense'
Rogan hits Patel over Epstein claims: ‘Doesn't make any sense'

The Hill

timea few seconds ago

  • The Hill

Rogan hits Patel over Epstein claims: ‘Doesn't make any sense'

Podcaster Joe Rogan attacked FBI Director Kash Patel in a new episode of his podcast Friday, charging that Patel's claims on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were inconsistent. 'The guy's saying there's no tapes, there's no video. That doesn't make any sense. Everyone knows it doesn't make any sense,' Rogan said in his most recent episode with former CIA officer Mike Baker. Patel appeared on Rogan's podcast in June, weeks prior to the release of the memo that ignited the firestorm. He then said repeatedly that the administration would be forthcoming in its review of documents related to Epstein. 'I've said it, Dan Bongino has said it. We've reviewed all the information and the American public is going to get as much as we can release,' Patel told Rogan. 'We're going to give you every single thing we have and can,' he later added. The FBI director has taken considerable heat over a memo from the FBI and the Department of Justice released in early July stating that Epstein had died by suicide, and that there was no evidence that the disgraced financier had blackmailed powerful figures — a disappointment to many supporters of President Trump who had hoped his administration would unearth new revelations about the case. The Trump administration has since moved, unsuccessfully, to unseal grand jury transcripts related to Epstein, but has held off on releasing hundreds of hours of videos and photos it has reviewed, saying they contained child photography. In his appearance on Rogan's podcast in June, Patel at one point hedged on a question from Rogan about whether the government had video from Epstein's island, alleged to be a hub for sex trafficking. 'Is there video from the island?' Rogan asked. 'Not of what you want,' Patel replied. In his episode released Friday, Rogan said the issue remained 'crazy' to him. 'The Epstein stuff is so crazy because when Kash Patel was on here and he was like, there's no — there's nothing, and I was like, what are you talking about? Yeah, I didn't even know what to say,' Rogan said. Trump has been the subject of several media reports in recent days of his social ties to Epstein in the early 2000s, most of which he has vehemently denied. On Friday, the Justice Department interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's longtime associate who is serving a 20-year prison sentence.

Judge blocks Trump's birthright citizenship restrictions in third ruling since high court decision
Judge blocks Trump's birthright citizenship restrictions in third ruling since high court decision

Boston Globe

timea few seconds ago

  • Boston Globe

Judge blocks Trump's birthright citizenship restrictions in third ruling since high court decision

Advertisement Lawyers for the government had argued Sorokin should narrow the reach of his earlier ruling granting a preliminary injunction, arguing it should be 'tailored to the States' purported financial injuries.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'The record does not support a finding that any narrower option would feasibly and adequately protect the plaintiffs from the injuries they have shown they are likely to suffer,' Sorokin wrote. A federal judge in New Hampshire issued a ruling earlier this month prohibiting Trump's executive order from taking effect nationwide in a new class-action lawsuit. U.S. District Judge Joseph LaPlante in New Hampshire had paused his own decision to allow for the Trump administration to appeal, but with no appeal filed in the last week, his order went into effect. On Wednesday, a San Francisco-based appeals court found the president's executive order unconstitutional and affirmed a lower court's nationwide block. Advertisement A Maryland-based judge said this week that she would do the same if an appeals court signed off. The justices ruled last month that lower courts generally can't issue nationwide injunctions, but it didn't rule out other court orders that could have nationwide effects, including in class-action lawsuits and those brought by states. The Supreme Court did not decide whether the underlying citizenship order is constitutional. Plaintiffs in the Boston case earlier argued that the principle of birthright citizenship is 'enshrined in the Constitution,' and that Trump does not have the authority to issue the order, which they called a 'flagrantly unlawful attempt to strip hundreds of thousands of American-born children of their citizenship based on their parentage.' They also argue that Trump's order halting automatic citizenship for babies born to people in the U.S. illegally or temporarily would cost states funding they rely on to 'provide essential services' — from foster care to health care for low-income children, to 'early interventions for infants, toddlers, and students with disabilities.' At the heart of the lawsuits is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1868 after the Civil War and the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision. That decision found that Scott, an enslaved man, wasn't a citizen despite having lived in a state where slavery was outlawed. The Trump administration has asserted that children of noncitizens are not 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States and therefore not entitled to citizenship.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store