THRISSUR, Kerala— Thousands of doctors across India wore black badges and protested with posters June 1 demanding punitive action against high profile yoga guru Baba Ramdev, who has been deriding modern medicine and spreading misinformation against India’s vaccination drive in the fight against a surge of COVID infections and deaths across the country.

“Lakhs (hundreds of thousands) of people have died because of allopathic [modern] medicines, far more than those who died because they did not get treatment or oxygen,” Ramdev appears to have said in a video that went viral on social media. Ramdev has a vast fanbase including 2.4 million followers on Twitter.

India’s official COVID-19 infections crossed 28 million at the end of May with more than 335,000 official deaths while independent observers estimate the real figures to be several times higher. A study by the University of Michigan estimates there were 1.21 million COVID deaths in India by mid-May when the official tally stood at only 270,000.

In the viral video, the man who appears to be Ramdev called medical doctors and allopathy “stupid and bankrupt” science. Starting as a penniless yogi (ascetic monk) two decades ago, Ramdev built up the multi-billion dollar Patanjali brand that markets pride in Indian culture with its popular Ayurvedic products based on ancient Indian medical practices, from toothpaste, face creams and pasta to marketing “Coronil” and “Corona kit” to fight the COVID pandemic, claiming his Ayurvedic medicine cured all COVID patients within one week in a trial. That prompted the state government to clarify that Patanjali had only applied for a manufacturing license to make immunity boosters that are not a cure to COVID. Patanjali’s owner and cofounder Acharya Balkrishna has an estimated net worth of $2.3 billion from the consumer goods company, according to Forbes.

The video also challenged the efficacy of vaccination and widely used coronavirus medicines including remdesivir and fabiflu, approved by the Drugs Controller General of India, claiming that these drugs caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

While vaccine clinics are often scenes of long lines and many Indians have been scrambling to find vaccines nearby them, Indian media has also reported on the fear of vaccination in India’s underdeveloped north. Villagers in the state Uttar Pradesh fled their homes and jumped into a river when a team of health officials arrived for a vaccination campaign, according to the The Times of India.

In its June 3 follow up, India’s largest circulated English daily cited fear of “vaccine death” a big stumbling block in the vaccination drive in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state with over 220 million people, amid proliferation of myths “that the vaccine reduces immunity, makes one sterile and, in the worst cases, kills.” 

After condemnation from India’s health minister, a Patanjali representative accused Ramdev’s critics of a “conversion and Christian conspiracy” against Ayurveda and a plot to malign yoga. The ancient practice of yoga that has roots in India and is now popular worldwide has become a point of national pride for many Indians. Ayurveda is alternative medicine based on ancient Indian techniques like herbal remedies that many medical associations consider pseudo science.

The India Medical Association - that groups India’s more than 350,000 registered medical doctors – urged the government on May 22 to prosecute the yoga guru under the Epidemic Diseases Act (which describes the powers of the government to prevent the spread of disease)  because his “untutored” statements are “a threat to the literate society of the country as well as to the poor people falling prey to him.”

Dr. Harsh Vardhan, India’s health minister, asked Ramdev to “withdraw” his controversial comments on doctors and the role of modern medicine. Vardhan said the explanations in the video were “unsatisfactory” and that the comments demoralized medical practitioners and denigrated the role of several medicines and vaccines helping the world slow down the pandemic.

“You should be aware that like in India, several medics and healthcare professionals around the world have sacrificed themselves in their fight against the virus. Your comments have not only hurt doctors but also people everywhere and your explanations are unsatisfactory,” he said.

Since the IMA president Dr. JA Jayalal is a Protestant Christian, critics of Ramdev believe Patanjali’s claim of a Christian plot to convert Indians is a method to fuel Hindu nationalist fear of the growth of Christianity. Only an estimated 2.3% of the population identifies as Christian.

“Hindu nationalists always prefer to underpin Christians to anything,” said John Dayal, an outspoken Christian activist in India. “They use us to whip up conversion hysteria, and our social, education and healthcare service is easy target for this propaganda.”

Accusations of “conversions” and “Christian conspiracy” have been stock weapons for Hindu nationalists to divert embarrassing criticism for decades. When Australian Baptist missionary Graham Stains and his young two sons were torched alive in their van in eastern India by Hindu fundamentalists in 1999, the ruling BJP leadership branded it as an “international Christian conspiracy to discredit the BJP government”. Later, Hindu fundamentalists were arrested and convicted for the brutal murders.

On the IMA website, Dr. Jayalal referred to time as a gift from “my almighty God Jesus Christ” and quoted a prayer of Catholic saint Mother Teresa: “You can do what I cannot do, I can do what you cannot do but together we can do great things.”

Ramdev’s followers point to those words as evidence of a plot to convert Indians to Christianity.

“What IMA President thinks: Using hospitals to convert to Christianity, contempt for Hinduism, seeing COVID as a ‘silver lining’ because of conversions and more,” reads OpIndia, a Hindu nationalist website.

Neither IMA nor Dr. Jayalal responded to requests for comment about the allegation. Meanwhile, the IMA unit in Uttarakhand state in the Himalayas, where Ramdev’s Patanjali network is headquartered, slapped a Rs. 10 billion ($137 million) libel suit against Ramdev’s network.

The IMA national leaders also wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi urging him to stop the “misinformation campaign against vaccination by Baba Ramdev”.

In the letter addressed to Modi, the IMA urged him “to take appropriate action against individuals viciously propagating the message of fear on vaccination and challenge the Government of India protocols for treatment for their vested interest in their company products. This in our opinion is a clear-cut case of a sedition and such persons should be booked immediately without any delay under the charges of sedition.”

The country-wide protest demanding punitive action against Ramdev on June 1 only reiterated this demand.

Based in New Delhi, Anto Akkara has been a journalist with international media for three decades covering South Asia for CNS, ENI, World Watch Monitor and more. Following the 2008 bloodshed against Christians of Kandhamal in eastern Odisha state, Akkara has been spearheading a campaign for justice for Kandhamal along with his books.