Nithyananda in police custody. Picture by Ved Prakash Gautam

April 21: The self-styled seer who told women devotees he was an avatar of Krishna and so could hug them as “gopikas” whenever he wanted has been trapped in an embrace he had been desperately trying to avoid.

The bear hug of the law caught up with the absconding Swami Nithyananda when a joint team from Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh police arrested him today from the hill state.

The arrest came over a month after the Tamil seer — caught on camera romping with an actress in his ashram near Bangalore — had been charged with rape and intimidation.

“A joint team led by Himachal Pradesh and Bangalore police on Wednesday arrested Swami Nithyananda along with four accomplices from an ashram in the Arki sub-division of Solan district,” said Prem Thakur, the police chief of Solan, some 50km from Shimla.

“We will produce him before Ramnagar court near Bangalore under whose jurisdiction his ashram falls. It is the same court that had rejected Nithyananda’s anticipatory bail plea,” said a Bangalore police official.

The 32-year-old seer, whose alleged sex romp was broadcast by Tamil TV channels early in March, had gone underground after Bangalore police charged him with rape, cheating, unnatural sex and intimidation based on a complaint by a former associate.

Although Lenin, the associate, had filed his complaint with Chennai police, the case had been transferred to Bangalore as most of the alleged crimes were said to have taken place at Nithyananda’s headquarters near Bangalore.

Lenin, who admitted to secretly videotaping the swami’s alleged sex romp with Tamil actress Ranjitha, had also said Nithyananda would tell women devotees he was an avatar of Krishna and that they were gopikas, and so he could hug them whenever he wanted.

Nithyananda had claimed Lenin was trying to defame him by levelling such allegations.

Lenin also claimed that a few male devotees had left the ashram after the seer forced them to have sex with him, while one person had died under suspicious circumstances and another had attempted suicide.

After the media exposé, Nithyananda, then in Hardwar, had met select journalists and claimed he had been in a trance when he was videotaped. He later stepped down as the head of his mutt and said he was going into isolation to introspect.

But the law caught up with him after the police intercepted a call he made from his mobile, police sources said.

“We received a fax message from Karnataka police on April 17 that Nithyananda was hiding in the state. We launched a joint hunt and finally arrested him this afternoon,” additional director-general of Himachal police, I.D. Bhandari, said.