Bhakti Purusottama Swami

What the allegations are, in the dossier’s own material:

• A December 2022 post by Sanaka Rsi, a campaigner on child protection, alleged “sexual abuse of children and young men perpetrated by Bhakti Purushottam Swami (BPS)” (vi-2022-12).
• An anonymous letter from a group calling itself the “Mayapuri Community” (February 2023) asked whether Mayapur would act on the “allegations of child abuse leveled against” him (emails-2023).
• On 10 May 2023 an e-mail headed “sexual abuse by Bhakti Purushotama S (see docs attached)” was sent to Jayapataka Swami, about twenty GBC members, the child-protection office and Bhakti Purusottama Swami himself (emails-2023). The attached documents are not in the dossier.
• On 11 June 2023 a further anonymous e-mail, “Consider yourselves duly informed”, sent to GBC members and the child-protection office’s director, relayed a third-hand account about a boy; the person who was said to be its source later denied having said anything (emails-2023).
• Social-media comments in the dossier mention older rumours from Mayapur in the 1980s and 1990s, without any first-hand account.

These are reported allegations only. The record shows that they reached ISKCON’s leadership and its child-protection office in 2023; it does not show what, if anything, was investigated or concluded.

The GBC’s letter of 24 October 2016 (gbc-2016-10) shows that the GBC itself took up the matter. No GBC resolution or published decision on it has been found.

The letter’s list of victims is not reproduced here. No document has been found that shows when Bhakti Purusottama Swami learned of the sexual abuse, as opposed to the violence, or that anyone reported it to the police. The 2023 appeal argues that, as a person in charge, he failed in a duty to report it under India’s child-protection law (POCSO); that is the complainant’s argument (appeal-2023).

In a letter of about 2015, also in the dossier, Bhakti Purusottama Swami wrote that a review committee had found a complaint against the trust’s chairman “prooved false” and that a further investigation was “in limbo”: “I do not know exactly what to be done.”

Earlier, in 2006, ISKCON’s child-protection office recorded that a complaint about Mayapur’s chief executive and a girl of 14 or 15 was “first … reported to Bhakti Purusottama Swami in the beginning of January”, that “he did not understand the girl was a minor” and “didn’t report it to the CPT”; he later involved Jayapataka Swami and complied with the manager’s interim suspension (report to the CPO, 9 May 2006, in the dossier, pp. 128–131).

No response from Bhakti Purusottama Swami on Habibpur has been found.