Sant Shri Asaramji Bapu Ashram Trust

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Sant Shri Asaramji Bapu Ashram Trust was founded in 1973 at Motera, on the banks of the Sabarmati River near Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, by Asaram Bapu, born Ashumal Sirumalani and also known as Asha Ram. The Trust teaches a devotional blend of Vedanta and yoga emphasizing celibacy, meditation and obedience to the guru, combined with explicit opposition to Western cultural influence.

At its reported peak before Asaram's 2013 arrest, the Trust operated around 400 ashrams and forty residential schools across eighteen countries, claiming tens of millions of followers, a geographic reach that placed the organization well beyond South Asia and among the larger Hindu guru organizations of its era. Alongside that network of ashrams and residential schools, the Trust ran medical, educational and charitable programs at that same reported peak, extending its activity beyond religious instruction into practical social services delivered under the same institutional umbrella across its many centers.

Asaram Bapu remains the organization's founder figure today, even as he serves a life sentence for rape.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 2013, an allegation of rape was made against Asaram Bapu. He publicly denied it, describing it as a political conspiracy, and was arrested days later. A court convicted him in 2018; the conviction and life sentence were upheld on appeal in 2026. A separate Gandhinagar case brought a second conviction against him.

Asaram remains incarcerated under his Jodhpur life sentence for rape, upheld by the Rajasthan High Court in May 2026; a further appeal was pending before the Supreme Court of India as of late June 2026, which had by then declined to suspend the sentence. Two custody developments followed: the Rajasthan High Court granted him his first regular parole, twenty days, on 3 August 2026, rejecting the state's objections as unsupported, and the Supreme Court, on 6 August 2026, declined his request for interim medical bail while permitting him a trained caretaker in custody. Neither decision resolves the pending appeal.

Separately, in the Gandhinagar case, the Gujarat High Court suspended that sentence and granted six months of temporary bail on medical grounds on 6 November 2025, extended at least to 15 June 2026; that appeal, too, remains undecided on the merits. This atlas states the convictions as courts have entered them and the appeals as courts have left them, adopting no view of its own on the outcomes still pending.