Baba taken to Institute as police examine ‘Torture Room’, CCTV

Chaitanyananda Saraswati, accused of molesting 17 women students, was taken to the institution he used to head. He was interrogated by Delhi Police regarding the torture room and the CCTV locations, officials said on Monday.

According to the police, the accused, who was the director of Delhi’s Sharda Institute of Indian Management in Vasant Kunj, is facing criminal proceedings for allegedly preying on female students enrolled in postgraduate management diploma courses under the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) scholarship.

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Chaitanyanand Saraswati, also known as Partha Sarathy, reportedly fled on August 4, soon after the institute received a complaint from the Indian Air Force headquarters alleging that he had molested female students.

A senior officer said in a statement that they got their hands on Sarathy on Sunday from a hotel in Agra, adding further that he was then produced before the court, which sent him to 5-day police custody.

After a few hours of questioning at the institute, the police returned him to custody.

Investigators revealed that Chaitanyananda would call the female students to his room late at night and threaten to lower their grades or fail them if they did not comply with his advances.

Chaitanyananda was taken to the institution’s ground-floor torture room by the police, where he used to call his female students for private meetings.

So far, statements from three wardens of the institute have been recorded, all of whom are accused of assisting Chaitanyananda in deleting incriminating messages.

WhatsApp messages retrieved from the phones of approximately 50 female students at the institute have uncovered 16 years of abuse, including sexually explicit texts and instances of coerced physical contact.

There are also allegations that CCTV footage was deleted, and the DVR has now been sent to the Forensic Science Laboratory for analysis.

While investigating the institute, police inspected the locations of the CCTV cameras on the premises and also questioned Chaitanyananda about them.

The investigation focused on determining which cameras Baba had access to and how he monitored the activities of the female students from those locations.

Seventeen women filed complaints at the Defence Colony Police Station in early August, accusing Chaitanyanand of harassing students.

The officer further mentioned that Chaitanyanand has allegedly been preying on women for nearly two decades, emboldened by his ability to escape previous molestation charges in 2009 and 2016.

This time, the scandal came to light when 17 women lodged complaints at the Defence Colony Police Station in early August. At the time, Chaitanyananda was in London, but he was last traced to Agra.