THE HARE KṚṢṆAS OF FREEDOM VILLAGE – AN INTERVIEW WITH SITAPATI DAS

by Thomas S.

The occupation of the New Zealand Parliament grounds in February and March of 2022, will be remembered for generations to come as a defining chapter in our nation's history.

'Freedom Village', as the occupation came to be known, was an unscripted phenomenon that evolved during the arrival of the freedom convoy to Wellington, which began on Waitangi Day and which gathered a diaspora of the disaffected from all across the country.

Over the following three weeks, the makeshift village became a colourful encampment and a Mecca of sorts for those from all walks of life, who saw through the lies of the fake pandemic and who shared a common grievance about Comrade Ardern's dictatorship.

And while the legacy media went out of its way to dehumanise those who participated in the event as being a 'river of filth' and so forth, the reality is that every soul who helped build and sustain the occupation, had a story to tell which should have been told at the time.

One of these stories is of the small group of Hare Kṛṣṇas, who came from various places around the country after having been excluded from their temples by the vaccination mandates, as well as the restrictions which had been placed on congregational gatherings.

Sitapati das, who had arrived with the convoy at the very beginning and who stayed the course of the occupation until the very end, was already seasoned to the situation.

“There were about three or four of us who had been going out to all the protests in Auckland, doing a bit of chanting, so there were already some people from Auckland at Parliament who knew us,” he says.

As the convoy began to evolve into an occupation, Sitapati and his comrades dug in and it wasn't long before reinforcements arrived from Northland with catering equipment to do what the Hare Kṛṣṇas do best – large-scale catering in order to keep the troops fed and the morale high.

“We were feeding several thousand people every single day, depending on donations of vegetables in order to keep the kitchen running and giving out hot meals freely. It was a total gift economy of giving and receiving.” Sitapati says.

With yoga and meditation classes, hot vegetarian meals, as well as chanting and dancing to the hypnotic mantra from which they have earned their namesake, the Hare Kṛṣṇas soon became a memorable fixture of the community.

Sitapati, who had relocated from Australia back to New Zealand at the onset of the first lockdown, already had a hunch long before the mandates, that something was amiss.

“I could see a whole chain of events coming out of this, and they didn't depend on whether this was a legitimate pandemic or not. So from one day to the next we packed up all our suitcases and flew back to New Zealand, into the first lockdown,”he says.

Once settled on home soil again, he then dived deep into the data in order to understand the risk profile that his family was facing, particularly given that his wife and son were both dependent on the medical system for their health.

According to Sitapati:

“I was looking at how these statistics were collected and I was like, there's no way this would pass a peer review. They're literally paying hospitals to report people as covid patients. You can't rely on statistics when you're paying people for them.”

“Then later on, the government started to do things like ban congregations, so people couldn't come together and chant Hare Kṛṣṇa, or go to church. And then even further, banning people from going to church or the temple, based on some experimental injection.”

It was this in particular, that Sitapati found most disturbing at the time, and as he points out:

“Our scriptures contain histories of governments banning the chanting of Hare Kṛṣṇa, and that's exactly what they were doing.”

Furthermore, it was not so long ago that the Hare Kṛṣṇas were imprisoned, tortured and subjected to forced medication and psychiatric treatment, for practicing their religion in Eastern Europe during the twilight years of the Soviet Union.

THE CHAND KAZI:

The religion, which is more traditionally known as Gaudiya Vaisnavism and which is rooted in the Vedic paradigm from which modern-day Hinduism is also derived, underwent a renaissance in India during the middle ages.

By the early sixteenth century, Gaudiya Vaisnavism had begun to assert itself as distinct from what had otherwise become an exclusive monopoly on spiritualism by hereditary brahmins.

The resulting religious enthusiasm among the masses, irrespective of caste, became a nuisance for both the hereditary brahmins, as well as Muslim communities. As such, the Chand Kazi, or Muslim magistrate of the Navadvipa province in the Bengal region, outlawed the public chanting of Hare Kṛṣṇa in response to complaints from these groups.

In defiance of this, thousands of Gaudiya Vaisnavas assembled together and proceeded toward the Chand Kazi's home, where they occupied his garden with chanting and dancing until negotiations took place to settle the issue.

Sitapati points to this event as an inspiration during the protest and remarks that:

“Our kirtans, our chanting together at the protest was illegal, not just because we were doing it at Parliament, but it was illegal to congregate like that, anywhere in the country at that time. I have a problem with that and when I have a problem with something like that, I do something about it.”

“I'm not gonna do the chanting secretly somewhere else. I'll take that chanting and do it illegally on the front lawn of the government's house, just like with the Chand Kazi.”

Having formerly spent a number of years in South America as a missionary, Sitapati points out that:

“Chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa in volatile circumstances and protests is nothing new or unusual to me.”

But not everyone was so supportive of the efforts of these rebel Vaisnavas, who faced scrutiny from their peers and even sanctions from institutional authorities, for their participation in the protest.

“People started inventing all kinds of deviant doctrines, and saying stuff like “we don't chant in protests” – since when? I've been chanting in tear gas and have had people shooting shotguns around me in South America, and nobody said anything like that then.” Sitapati says.

At one point during the occupation, an Auckland-based affiliate of the movement published a notice in the classifieds section of the New Zealand Herald, naming a number of those participating in the protest, by both their legal and spiritual names in an effort to put distance between themselves and the occupation.

According to Sitapati:

“They put out this policy, this national policy which was unprecedented, that any members of ISKCON who attend a protest march, who chant the holy name, wear a dhoti or kurta or sari, distribute books, or distribute prasadam, without the permission of the national council, face sanctions. And I'm like, this is absolutely unprecedented.”

Meanwhile, teaching staff, including the school principal, were removed from the Hare Kṛṣṇa school at the Auckland temple, after refusing to be vaccinated. An interim principal from outside the community who had been fully vaccinated was hired as a replacement.

Similar themes across a number of communities and organisations certainly suggest that some degree of political interference has taken place in religious organisations over the years – and the Hare Kṛṣṇa movement, like many churches and so forth, is no exception to this.

Sitapati is philosophical about the situation however:

“One of the things that the Parliament protest cast in a clear light, was that the division was not between religious groups, because that thing cut sideways, horizontally across everything. It wasn't like Christians versus Muslims versus Hare Kṛṣṇas.”

“Everyone who was there, whatever religious affiliation, you had people from your own religion saying that you were the bad guys. And then you're standing shoulder to shoulder with someone from another religious group, against the police line.”

AFTER THE PROTEST:

In the years since the occupation, Sitapati has continued to face some degree of exclusion from temples for his role in the protest. He has however, cut a niche within the awakened demographic in the worldwide Vaisnava community, which is spread across both mainstream, as well as independent practitioners.

In addition to podcasting regularly and dropping Vedic insights on current events, Sitapati is also now working toward self-sufficiency in rural Taranaki, growing organic vegetables and producing 'ahimsa' milk. This lifestyle of 'simple living and high thinking' is a principle of sustainable economics that Sitapati sees as a core part of returning to a more wholesome way of life.

“We know how this thing ends” Sitapati says, “and it ends with the collapse of the over-stretched systems of the world – social, economic and political, under the weight of the compounding effects of their internal contradictions.”

He also speaks of an alternative socio-economic concept known as varnashram, which is based on the Vedic concept of civilisation and which he sees as a viable alternative to the various 'isms' being floated about in the modern day.

According to Sitapati:

“Every civilisation fundamentally has its basis in economics and the economics depends on the technology that's in use. So the technology determines how you produce and distribute food. And that's your economic question – how do we eat? And then your society is built upon that with social structures. 'Daivi varnashram dharma', a worldwide, decentralised, divine civilisation, is agrarian in nature.”

“It's about local food production and consumption, rather than what we have now, which is hyper-specialised, with massively stretched supply lines, eating food that's been grown in other parts of the world.”

“And then your modes of governance shrink down into that as well. What we now have is nation states, but they're only a very recent development, like in the 1800's a country like Germany wasn't even a country, it was made up of several different states.”

“And so we see a devolution back to that, because the ability to impose control over large distances breaks down. And so we go back to more natural organising units for human beings, which are tribal in nature. But this means local determination, where the natural qualities of people and the social structures are more harmoniously expressed.”

Sitapati has also expressed interest in starting a political party at some point, which would campaign on the basis of ending the current system, if only to raise awareness of what possibilities could exist, if the people truly wanted them. He is under no illusion that such a political party would ever be allowed into Parliament however.

“Your votes are useless. Democracy is just a carrot to stop the peasants from revolting.” he says.

The only question for Sitapati right now, is whether to call it the 'Hare Kṛṣṇa Party', or to give the Electoral Commission a bit of extra paperwork to shuffle around by registering it as the 'Hare Kṛṣṇa, Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare Party'.

“I'd love to see that on the ballot paper in 2026!” he says.

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