Google Jayant Athavale, and the search doesn’t yield a single published interview. There are a couple of videos on YouTube, however, which appear to have been produced in-house by the Sanatan Sanstha to establish Athavale as the interpreter of his guru Bhaktaraj Maharaj of Indore. In these videos, Athavale is heard asking the sadhakas to walk the path shown by “Bapuji” which is taking actual steps towards the formation of “Hindu Rashtra” and “Ram Rajya” by destroying all “durjans”.
Athavale, according to Sanatan Sanstha spokesperson Chetan Rajhans, lives inside the Ramnathi Ashram, and has held no official position since 1999. The 76-year-old is not in the pink of health. “He can barely walk, confines himself to his room in the Ashram, hardly meets even the sadhakasi, has lost his teeth, so his speaking ability has suffered. He is there for the seekers though,” Rajhans says.
Outside the Ashram, there aren’t many people who are willing to talk about Athavale. One Goa BJP functionary, who attended the 2014 Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Adhiveshan held in Ponda in June 2014, says he heard Athavale’s speech and found nothing “remarkable” in it except an appeal to stop “attacks on Hindu saints and Hindu culture”. “He was hardly inspiring,” the BJP functionary recalls.
But on 9 September, Sanstha mouthpiece Sanatan Prabhat published a three-point clarification issued by Athavale “explaining why he has not said a word about the noise created by various newspapers and news channels about ban on the Sanatan Sanstha”. In this clarification, Athavale says he is engaged in raising “sattvikta ” (purity and piety) in the society and he did not need to put forth his point of view since the official Sanatan Sanstha spokesperson was doing this job.
Two, he says most of his daytime is spent in writing books about Dharma and Sadhana. “I still have material enough to write another 7,000 books for which I need to use all the time I have. The issue about ban on Sanatan Sanstha is a temporary one and I think at the age of 76, I should use my time more for my work than give importance to this temporary issue,” he wrote.
Athavale also writes that the effort to finish off the Sanatan Sanstha will not succeed if god was protecting the Sanstha. “For these reasons I don’t say a word about ban on the Sanstha and don’t even think about it,” the Sanstha founder says. Clearly, Athavale—who practiced in Britain as a psychotherapist for 7 years and later in Mumbai—is sensing the heat.