DIRE situations bring desperate responses. Charlatans roaming India have marshalled armies of boon-seekers. Blind faith is a virtue of poverty, or fear of it. Which means the rich and the poor are equally susceptible to its lure.

Clean-shaven Nirmal Baba, holds televised courts of his followers. With a slightly sly grin, he prescribes the use of branded fountains pens, the consumption of sweetmeats, samosas and clarified butter to a million-plus followers. They hope to get in return government jobs, still in vogue in the era of private enterprise.

Suitable bridegrooms and relief from lower back pain or unhappy marriages are some of the other benefits of keeping faith with the baba. Thousands like him travel through the country, pocketing cash and real estate.

One baba credited with dancing in a trance with a prime minister, an ardent follower, is in jail on suspicion of raping his female devotees.

There is nothing on record to indicate that the nation-state itself frowns on this widespread rush for tantalising short cuts to prosperity. But nation-states do not themselves have the liberty to lean on blind faith in negotiating the real world.

Remember that India had pawned a fair slice of gold from its official vaults to stave off defaulting on unwieldy foreign debts in 1990. The Soviet Union had collapsed without trace and oil prices were going through the roof courtesy the US-led Operation Desert Shield. Manmohan Singh was invented to show the way out. Now a Hindu soothsayer says there is far more gold lying buried in a secret treasure than was pawned to keep India from losing face. It is lying buried as unmarked treasure in a village in Unnao, near the river Ganges in Uttar Pradesh. With the economy in distress, a thousand tonnes of dream gold, it is surmised, could easily help the country write off its mounting debts.

The venue of the prophecy is close to Bithur, a major battleground where Indian rebels led by Nana Sahib Peshwa gave British troops a hard time in 1857. The Hindu raja, a partisan of Mughal rule, was subsequently hanged, but he left without sharing the secret of the hidden treasure.

The entire dilapidated fortress is being dug up for signs of the promised treasure. It’s a feast for TV channels and their craving for the sensational 24x7. The state and federal governments are chipping in with crucial support. Ace archaeologists and geologists from the government’s roster have been commandeered to intensify the treasure hunt.

(My personal fear is that if someone does strike an ounce or two of gold coins, who can then stop the sadhu from dreaming of Ayodhya-like temples buried under Babri-like mosques!)

Foolproof police bandobast has been ordered to keep the crowds from nibbling at the finds, if indeed there are any.

On the other hand, India’s main communist party has expelled a leader after he filmed himself lying on a bed of cash. Remember Mollie the mare who decorated herself with things human after throwing out the men from the Manor Farm in the Orwellian satire on communism?

Samar Acharjee, of the Communist Party of India-Marxist in the north-eastern state of Tripura, was shown on local television channels lying on bundles of notes, with more on his head and chest.

Acharjee claimed he was not a hypocrite like some other party members. He had withdrawn Rs20 lakh, which should approximate $32,000, from his bank account, and fulfilled his “long-cherished dream of sleeping on a bed of money”.

He was not like some other party members he did not name “who depict themselves as proletariat yet have a huge amount of money”.

Acharjee was expelled because the party does not “support this kind of immoral work”. It is another matter that the voters of West Bengal had censured the party itself in the last polls. That was for acquiring traits that were not entirely dissimilar to the penalised comrade’s bourgeois quest.

I remember the slogan the communists shouted in 1977, just before they came to power in West Bengal for a magic run of three unbroken decades. That was the year Indira Gandhi was routed after a failed attempt at dictatorship. “Ye Tata, Birla ki sarkar, nahi chalegi nahi chalegi” (The government run by big business is doomed).

At some point down the road, the anti-capitalist communists chose to take away land from the poor to hand it over to a big industrialist to build cars. The project failed amid bloody protests, which eventually sent the party packing.

So what can you say of a country where an idealist begins to harbour the jaded dream of sleeping atop a pile of currency notes. What can you say of a country that heeds a soothsayer’s vision of buried treasure and deploys ace scientists to search for gold?

There is a prophecy, and if there isn’t one, we can invent it, that sooner or later India will become the world’s most prosperous and powerful country. Someone has advised it, and it can’t be Germany or Japan obviously, that prosperity somehow comes with muscle power.

The mantra learnt, India plunged itself into heavy debts to build up its military sinews. An arsenal of nuclear bombs and missiles has made it militarily invincible, never mind the critics who caution it is in fact now more insecure as a nation-state.

The country has earmarked an ambitious military budget for arriving halfway towards the prophesied goal. The other part, which predicts prosperity, is dodgy. There are too many impersonal forces in a free-market economy whose whip hand is located on foreign shores.

In spite of the inherent vagaries, more or less every country offers its citizens dreams of invincibility and prosperity. Pakistan does too. The American constitution rests largely on an individual’s right to pursue and seek happiness.

The sadhu’s dream has given the nation respite from swirling despair, and something to hope for.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.jawednaqvi@gmail.com