Asaram’s official website states that he was born as Asumal Sirumalani in 1941 in Berani village of Sindh in Pakistan. After the partition in 1947, he came to Ahmedabad with his parents and studied till Class 4 in a school in the Maninagar area, but dropped out at the age of 10 after the death of his father, Thaumal.

He did odd jobs in his youth, including a reported stint as a tongawallah in Ajmer, and then, the website states, went towards the Himalayas on a spiritual quest, where he met his guru, Lilashah Bapu. It was Lilashah Bapu, who apparently gave him the name ‘Asaram’ in 1964 and “commanded him to carve his own path and guide people”.

Asaram came to Ahmedabad in the early 70s and set up Moksha Kutir, a small hut on the banks of river, in 1972. Soon, people were flocking to his hut and he gained popularity as Sant Asaramji Bapu. It wasn’t long before the hut had spawned into a full-fledged ashram. Soon, new ashrams had come up, including a sprawling complex in Delhi’s protected Ridge area.

When he was arrested in 2013, investigators had said the 77-year-old guru owed a sprawling Rs 10,000-crore business empire that comprised buildings, stocks and shares, a lucrative money-lending practice, selling Ayurvedic products and religious books.

n He is believed to own 400 ashrams across India and abroad and a legion of followers, many of whom still revere the controversial preacher. Even today, many of his disciples believe that he was jailed and convicted on false charges. “Even if Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh come and tell me that Bapu was wrong, I will still say, ‘No, No, No’,” said a young disciple in Delhi.

Asaram is married to Laxmi Devi and they have two children — son Narayan Sai, who is also behind bars, and daughter Bharti Devi.

The guru first ran into trouble in 2008, when teenage cousins Dipesh and Abhishek Vaghela who lived in his Motera gurukul were found dead on the riverbed near his ashram. Their parents had alleged that they were killed in the ashram after a round of black magic.

The state CID had in 2009 booked seven followers of Asaram in the death case. But Asaram fell from public grace in 2013, after he was arrested for the minor’s rape in Jodhpur. After that, two Surat-based sisters also accused him and his son of sexual exploitation. His followers were held for threatening and assaulting witnesses in rape cases against him and his son.

The police on October 6, 2013, registered complaints filed by the two sisters — one against Asaram and another against Narayan Sai — of rape, sexual assault, illegal confinement and other charges. The case is being tried in the Gandhinagar court.

He was also accused of grabbing land for building his ashrams in Surat and Ahmedabad. He and his son Sai were accused of grabbing the land located on the Delhi-Pune freight corridor belonged to Jayant Vitamins Limited. JVL, a public limited company, was delisted from the Bombay Stock Exchange in 2004 for defaulting on the BSE’s mandatory listing fees.

Asaram has also courted controversy in recent years with his debatable views. Valentine’s Day should be marked as the day for worshipping parents, he had said a few years ago.

In 2013, he told journalists that if Nirbhaya had chanted the Saraswati Mantra, she would not have boarded the bus where she was raped and assaulted. “She could’ve held the hand of one of the men and said, I consider you my brother.”