Gopal Krishna Goswami

His role. The Vrindavan gurukula, founded in 1976 beside the Krishna-Balaram temple, is today the Bhaktivedanta Gurukula and International School (BGIS). His memorial website calls him “the foundational guardian and patron” of its new 60-acre campus at Ajhai, outside Vrindavan. Construction began in his presence in May 2015 (ISKCON Desire Tree), and the school moved there in 2019. The school’s fundraising film for the campus ends with an appeal that its website prints over his signature: “Bhaktivedanta Gurukul and International School is a school with a difference. … This is a project with a difference and this project will produce children with good spiritual education, good character and will be a great help to the society and humanity at large.” In 2017 and 2018 he was one of the six members of the Vrindavan Executive Board, which the GBC listed as the zonal secretary for Vrindavan (GBC zonal assignments). No source found names him as a trustee or officer of the school itself.

What the GBC found. In June 2016 the GBC Executive Committee, answering the documentary Cost of Silence, wrote that “several months ago, students of the Vrindavana school were sexually abused off site by a local perpetrator who is known to be a danger”, whom the school had pushed the police to arrest. It put the school on probation and required, among other things, that its principal “live full time in Vrindavana and work full time at the school”. It added: “All efforts at fund-raising for a new school campus will be suspended, pending an approval of the GBC EC and the CPO Director that the above requirements have been completed for a minimum period of six months.” The resolution the GBC adopted (2017, res. 303) recorded the child-protection office’s finding that “child protection training, policies, and enforcement are inadequate within the BGIS”, and made the suspension of campus fundraising conditional on the reforms not being in place within three months. In 2018 the GBC noted “improvement … in regards to positive communications and cooperation with the Child Protection Team” and kept the school on probation until 2019 (res. 315). Whether fundraising was ever suspended is not known.

The allegations. The documentary’s companion text says that Gopal Krishna Goswami “took over the management” of the school in 2010 and that, when abuse was reported to him, he replied: “Lila Purusotoma Prabhu runs the management in Vrindavan gurukul. I as the GBC can not interfere with the regular running of the school. But you don’t worry about anything, you just continue your work of collecting money for the school”. It does not name who reported the abuse to him, and says that whenever abuse was brought to the school’s management “the order was ‘Please keep this in the family of ISKCON, do not let it get out.’” In 2024 the film’s maker, Sanaka Rsi dasa, wrote that a draft report the child-protection office submitted to the GBC in 2018 found that “in these course of these 73 days the CPO devotees uncovered a total of 62 incidents of child abuse with 8 teachers implicated”, and that the GBC “voted to keep the school open, with the same management”. In an interview the same year he said that the report asked the GBC to close the school or change its management, and that “Gopala-Krishna pressured the GBC, ‘No. Leave the gurukula open.’” He gives no source for that claim. The 2018 report has not been seen for this record; the GBC’s minutes record the probation but not individual votes. Lila Purushottam Das, appointed the school’s director in 2010 (ISKCON News), is still listed as its director on the school’s website in 2026.

Gopal Krishna Goswami died in 2024. No statement by him on these allegations has been found.