Ananta Rupa Dasa

The panel relied on statements from several former students, notes kept by ISKCON’s former Ministry of Education, and correspondence from 1985–86. It described a letter he wrote to the principal in July 1985 as one in which he “practically admits, although not specifically,” to the allegations. It also quoted an October 1986 letter in which the principal, Dhanurdhara Swami, wrote that he had been “dismissed from our faculty for child molestation”, had been removed from Bombay and Padayatra, and should not be allowed to live in any ISKCON temple.

Former students writing anonymously on the website VOICE in 1997 said that he came to the Vrindavan gurukula from the Mayapur gurukula in about 1981, bringing older Bengali youths who served as monitors in his ashram, and that he and these monitors sexually abused younger boys there; one described him as “extremely domineering”, hitting boys and pulling their ears. One wrote that at a community meeting at the Gita Nagari farm in Pennsylvania in 1990, Dhanurdhara Swami said he had sent Ananta Rupa from Vrindavan to Bombay and later, “with considerable effort”, had him removed from the Bombay temple, where the writer says he had become vice-president, and then from another temple. The writer said nothing was reported to the police. These accounts are anonymous; the monitors they name are not named here, as some may have been minors at the time.