Paper Details

This study examines why some charismatic spiritual movements disintegrate following scandal, while others endure by comparing the trajectories of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) and Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh’s Dera Sacha Sauda (DSS). Drawing on Max Weber’s concept of charismatic authority, the paper analyses how charisma is constructed, stabilised, and transformed through psychological, institutional, and ritual mechanisms. Osho’s movement was characterised by an explicitly anti-institutional ethos, therapeutic experimentation, and a form of practised charisma centred on individual liberation. However, its decentralised authority structure limited the routinisation of charisma. The collapse of Rajneeshpuram, precipitated by internal power struggles and the 1984 bioterror attack, demonstrates how charisma fragments when it fails to institutionalise beyond the leader’s presence. In contrast, Dera Sacha Sauda developed a highly structured organisational apparatus under Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, integrating seva-based discipline, confession rituals, mass spectacles, and strategic political alliances. Through tightly choreographed collective practices and mediated affect, DSS produced a routinised charisma embedded in followers’ emotional and social worlds. The movement’s persistence following Singh’s 2017 conviction illustrates how charismatic authority can outlive personal legitimacy when institutional and psychological commitments are deeply entrenched. By synthesising Weberian sociology with cognitive dissonance theory, social identity theory, Lifton’s model of thought reform, and groupthink dynamics, the study argues that charismatic authority survives not through personal magnetism alone but through institutionalisation, emotional synchrony, welfare dependency, and the production of durable collective identities.

Charismatic authority; routinisation of charisma; spiritual movements; Dera Sacha Sauda; Osho; cognitive dissonance; groupthink