The saints are marching in, through your TV screens, and coming straight for your wallet.

In February, Sirsa-based ‘spiritual leader’ Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh ‘Insaan’ (yes, he absolutely insists he is human, and that his late guru was a ‘Love Charger,’), announced that he was launching his own brand of “swadeshi” and organic products. The idea, apparently, is simple: once you’re all charged up, and much in love, do savor his brand of rice, pickles, honey, noodles and water. Bliss, shall follow.

After yoga ‘guru’ Baba Ramdev and ‘Sri Sri’ Ravi Shankar of the ‘Art of Living’ fame, Gurmeet Ram Rahim is the third significant religious leader who wants a pie out of the $50 billion Indian retail market. And why shouldn’t he? After all, like the other two babas, he too has millions of followers who, in pure business terms, offer a ready, captive market. And the numbers are certainly impressive.

Sample this: Ramdev’s nine year old Patanjali Ayurved already claims to have an annual revenue of Rs. 5,000 crore, up from virtually nothing in 2007 when it started. And now, it wants to double that figure during the current financial year itself. Ramdev is going after the big established multinationals in the trade — Nestle, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever — and he insists they will “be left clueless”.

Seeing Patanjali’s success, Ravi Shankar’s Sri Sri Ayurveda, which began operations in 2003, is also ramping up, although credible financial data is not yet available.

Now, godmen are as old as the concept of god itself. Every organised faith, cult or religious movement is effectively a business enterprise — with wealthy trusts, vaults full of gold, jewels and cash and swathes of prime real estate. Having said that, although these (mostly) bearded men have forever held the wealthiest businessmen in their thrall, they have perhaps never before run corporates or marketed products themselves, at least not in India. Until now.

It was reported in December last year that Patanjali Ayurved was looking to spend Rs. 360 crore on advertising between November and March. Soon after, in December, Patanjali and FMCG behemoth Dabur got into a fierce ad war, each claiming the other’s product to be unsafe and costlier. And when you are slugging it out, having a few well wishers in the media or in politics always helps. Oh yes, and a biopic on a popular network like Sony, for which you had to pay nothing? What could be better than that?

But what if no one wants to air your life’s story? No problem. If you are the love-charged Ram Rahim, you make your own movie (well, if that’s want you want to call it) and you are the producer, the director, the lyricist, the music composer, the editor, the cinematographer and yes, the lead actor! Plus, you get the most upmarket movie theaters in town to screen it for free, invite lakhs of devotees, and jam the roads.

And then, you do it all over again. Because, noodles.

None of this is to say that merchandise in the name of faith has not been marketed before. If anything, an avowed non-believer like this author would be the first to concede that organised religion, complete with all its accouterments, is the best marketed product in history. However, Indian corporates have mostly stayed clear of religion. In fact, even the 110 year old Hamdard Laboratories, which is managed by a Muslim religious trust, has never used a pied-piper like cult figure to market its products.

Not only have the likes of Ramdev and Ravi Shankar become prime time staple, they seem to have the government’s backing too. After all, both the Bharatiya Janata Party, which controls the union government, and the Aam Aadmi Party, which runs the Delhi government, despite being at loggerheads on practically everything, virtually patronized the “World Culture Festival” organised by Ravi Shankar’s foundation, in March, on the banks of the Yamuna in Delhi, despite serious objections by the National Green Tribunal (NGT). None other than prime minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the event.

Ravi Shankar’s foundation has stubbornly refused to pay the whittled down Rs 5 crore fine imposed on it by the NGT, in lieu of environmental damages, claiming it did not have the money. However, for nearly two months following the function, none of the mainstream media outlets bothered to investigate whether this claim was true, until this investigation by The Caravan showed that not only did the foundation have more than Rs 200 crore worth of assets, it also had revenues to the tune of Rs 80 crore. Now whether this was on account of sheer complacency or a conspiracy of silence, is anybody’s guess.

The emergence of the faith-based enterprise, complete with all the trappings of a modern corporate, could well determine how companies in India will do their business going forward. But whether this would make business practices any more ethical, only time will tell.