In the year 2009, Paramahamsa Nithyananda organises a peace walk across Tamilnadu which brought about a major change in the status of Hinduism and Hindus. Along with it, it brought about the unwanted attention of many anti-Hindu elements.
Ananda Ratha Yatra – Peace Walk
To instill a greater sense of responsibility into people and spread awareness about global peace, Nithyananda Mission organizes peace walks for several hundreds of kilometers, particularly with the youth in India and USA. In January 2009, a month long walk was organized with people participating from over 1000 villages covering 1000 km:
His Divine Holiness Personally inspires tens of thousands to do a pada yatra (journey by foot) to spread message of peace from village to village in South India
Walk for global peace and religious harmony, January 2009, flagged off by heads of various religions at Kanyakumari, India
Peace walk in South India participated in by hundreds of enthusiastic people
Peace walk 2009 passes by a temple in South India
Paramahamsa Nithyananda and other religious heads address a gathering of the peace walk participants, Tamil Nadu, India
Peace walk by Nithyananda Youth Foundation, Tamilnadu, India
Peace walk from Bangalore to Tiruvannamalai, South India
Peace walk in Tiruvannamalai, South India
Anti Hindu Elements
This peace walk brought about a major breakthrough in Tamil Nadu. Millions of people had a glimpse of the divine experience either by participating in the walk or even witnessing the walk. People had a taste of the joy and celebration that gets radiated by Hindu rituals. The most important fact that turned the heads of anti-Hindu elements towards Paramahamsa Nithyananda was that lakhs of Hindu converts were reconverting back to Hinduism. This is directly against their concentrated mass effort of converting Hindus to their religions.
These anti-Hindu forces joints hands to plan a very complicated, multi-level attack. They were on the lookout for some pawns for their conspiracy and that’s when they came in contact with Lenin, Vinay Bharadwaj and Aarathi Rao. Sun TV, a major television network in Tamilnadu was more than ready to be part of this conspiracy so that they can exploit this situation to extort money out of the organisation.
An excerpt from the article by Rajiv Malhotra based on his observation of the whole persecution on His Divine Holiness Paramahamsa Nithyananda
a large portion of the expenses have been allocated to develop grass-roots social and spiritual programs focusing primarily in Tamil Nadu, his native state. This is where he is seen as a threat by Dravidian as well as Christian forces. For instance, in December 2009, about 600 villages across Tamil Nadu sent their local Nithyananda leaders for a celebration and planning session in his main ashram near Bangalore. I happened to be present for the event. These common folks, mostly from the lower strata of Tamil society, had walked 300 kilometers for this journey which they saw as a spiritual pilgrimage. The reason for the anger of Christian and Dravidian forces is that his activities have put a dampener to conversions in many districts, and several Christians have return to Hinduism by getting initiated formally into his organization. The swami himself has spoken against conversions, and has also stated that the Dravidian movement had made Tamil people unspiritual in their lives, and that this had caused social decay. His Tamil language publications and courses have become his most popular ones, far exceeding the numbers in English. Also he is a very big threat because he is not a Brahmin. Because he cannot be targeted using the classical attack on Brahmins, and because the masses in Tamil Nadu were rising to swell his ranks, the threat he posed to the existing political power structure had to be stopped one way or another.