Until a fortnight or so ago, Acharya Balkrishna was a swarthy young man with a squarish face and badly-cut hair, the kind you commonly pass by on the streets of north India.

But this column is not about the revenge of the underclass against India's elite, not even if some of them have become new emperors of wealth via the market route that Manmohan Singh unleashed with some determination two decades ago.

This is about Acharya Balkrishna, one of thousands of saffron-clad godmen claiming either a direct or indirect connection with the almighty, who crisscross the India-Nepal landscape without fear but lots of favour, disregarding man-made rules of citizenship and lines demarcating borders.

Except, Balkrishna decided that his was not the way of the ascetics in the holy books, who gave up the good life in favour of an ashram in the Himalaya or led a secluded existence on the banks of the Ganga, thereby helping to bring to light the myriad meanings of the soul.

Balkrishna is the new age guru, at the very least the most enterprising aide behind India's best-known new age tele-evangelist guru, Baba Ramdev, whose latest claim to national headlines is his protest against corruption and black money. To cut a long story short in which India's leading politicians cut a sorry figure by bending both backwards and frontwards to appease the Baba, Ramdev and Balkrishna have become (depending which way you look at it) either victims of a dastardly establishment trying to discredit spiritual figures, or valiant upholders of the Hindu faith.

Early on, Balkrishna decided the road to gurudom was through the acquisition of wealth. What better way to satisfy Kuber, the pot-bellied god of wealth than to create a spiritual empire which fulfilled several needs at the same time? The first thing to do was to acquire several acres of land, and yes, build an ashram on the banks of the holy Ganga in Haridwar on which organic food would be grown and sold through wholly-owned patents. There were dark whisperings that some of the land had been illegally sold to Balkrishna by the Udaseen Akhara.

And since information is power, and since all those fattened on Manmohan Singh's material reform were also now seeking spiritual gain, what better way to feed them soul food than through 24x7 religious messaging on the Aastha TV channel, 99 per cent of whose shares were owned by Balkrishna himself?

The Ramdev-Balkrishna empire, including an island in Scotland, now amounted to a karmic cool $300 million. But the empire of the state struck back. Influential Congress leader Digvijaya Singh fired the first salvo, accusing Balkrishna of being a Nepali with a criminal record back home, that his Indian passport was fake, and that he had violated the Indian Arms Act.

Poor Balkrishna. Not really being versed in the ways of the Indian elite, leave alone the political elite which can run rings around the most sophisticated entrepreneurs, he began to defend himself to the press. Short of invoking the 1950 India-Nepal treaty, which guarantees to all Nepali citizens the right to live and work in India, the young godman did everything he could to paint a picture of being an honourable citizen. Even if he didn't pay his taxes on time.

A fawning media was taken aback when Balkrishna refused to come clean about the alleged land grab around the Divya Yog Trust. "Who do you think you are? Who are you to ask me?" Balkrishna answered.

That's how the first thread of the holy struggle within the unholy alliance began to unravel. The police cracked down on Ramdev & Co and in the ensuing melee, Ramdev escaped from the police dressed as a woman. Balkrishna went missing and subsequently said he had actually been tending to the injured.

At present, the live tv tamasha is over and India is catching its breath. Even the most ardent devotee will acknowledge that Ramdev and Balkrishna's reputations are somewhat dented because they sought to inject religion into politics. As for their suspiciously-gotten wealth, last heard the Income Tax authorities were beginning to ask a few questions.