A political storm has hit Maharashtra. The arrest of Ashok Kharat, a self-styled God-man from Nashik, on charges of rape, molestation, and cheating has brought an uncomfortable side of the State’s politics into the open. His alleged network—connecting him to politicians of multiple parties, bureaucrats, and senior police officers—has set off a chain of resignations, accusations, and factional manoeuvring within the ruling Mahayuti alliance.

Rupali Chakankar, chairperson of the Maharashtra State Women’s Commission and the women’s wing chief of the Nationalist Congress Party (Ajit Pawar faction), resigned from the commission on March 20, after photographs and videos showing her in close proximity to Kharat surfaced on social media. Sources say she stepped down at the direction of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. The timing of the episode—and the direction in which its political fallout is heading—has raised questions about whether the scandal is being used as a tool in the ongoing rivalry between Fadnavis’s BJP and its coalition partner Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena faction.

In mid-March, a video of Kharat went viral. In it, he was seen with a woman devotee, urinating into a glass and then offering it to her. The video also appeared to show him sexually exploiting her. The outrage that followed was immediate, but investigators say the case had been building for months.

The first FIR in the matter was filed by Kharat himself. On December 29, 2025, he approached the Vavi police station in Nashik alleging that he was being blackmailed with objectionable photographs and videos, with a demand of Rs.5 crore. In February 2026, an associate of Kharat was booked at a Shirdi police station in Ahilya Nagar district for allegedly creating morphed obscene images and issuing threats. Nashik police, sensing the gravity of the wider case, constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) on March 13 under IPS officer Tejaswini Satpute. Within days, on March 17–18, a woman approached Sarkarwada police station in Nashik city alleging Kharat had repeatedly sexually assaulted her between 2022 and 2025. The SIT arrested Kharat on March 18.

A breakthrough in the investigation came from an unlikely source. Neeraj Jadhav, a former employee of Kharat, filed a complaint on March 22 stating that Kharat had assaulted multiple women. Jadhav said that in 2024 he had confronted Kharat after a seven-months-pregnant woman—an acquaintance—told him that Kharat had attempted to assault her sexually during a visit. When Kharat dismissed the complaint and removed Jadhav from his job, Jadhav installed hidden cameras in Kharat’s office and recorded more than a hundred videos of the alleged assaults. He submitted all the footage to the SIT.

Chief Minister Fadnavis told the Maharashtra Assembly that eight cases had been registered against Kharat so far, and that three women had agreed to lodge formal complaints. Police had seized two laptops, a revolver, and 21 live cartridges during searches at Kharat’s properties.

Ashokkumar Eknath Kharat’s native village is Kahandalwadi in Nashik district. He had worked as a merchant navy officer and used the title ‘Captain’ as part of his public persona. Reporters and local sources in Nashik say his formal education did not go beyond Class 8. After returning to Nashik in 1992, he drifted through several occupations before setting himself up as an astrologer and numerologist in 2002, operating out of the Canada Corner area of Nashik city. A senior revenue officer who served in Nashik told Frontline that he would buy cheap ornaments in Mumbai and sell them to clients as “God-gifted jewellery”. “He used to buy beads at Rs. 5 or 10 and sell them for Rs. 10,000 and more,” the officer said. In 2003, he allegedly cheated a police officer and two young women close to him. A local politician is said to have intervened to protect Kharat at the time.

Patronage, postings, and prayer

Over the next two decades, Kharat built a following across North Maharashtra, drawing politicians, bureaucrats, police officers, builders, and industrialists to his establishment. He constructed the Ishaneshwar temple in Mirgaon village in Sinnar tehsil and set up a charitable trust, Shivanika, of which he was chairman. Chakankar was listed as a trustee.

On March 31, 2018—the last day of the financial year—the State tourism department, then headed by BJP Minister Jaykumar Rawal, sanctioned Rs. 1 crore, 5 lakh, and 83 thousand to develop the Ishaneshwar temple and its surroundings. Rawal continues to hold ministerial office in the current Fadnavis government. Congress State president Harshwardhan Sapkal demanded his removal. “Jaykumar Rawal should be sacked by Chief Minister Fadnavis for helping a fraud. He misused his ministerial position in granting that amount to Kharat,” Sapkal said. Sapkal also alleged that Higher and Technical Education Minister Chandrakant Patil—a long-standing internal rival of Fadnavis within the BJP—had performed a puja at Kharat’s temple seeking blessings to become Chief Minister. Patil has not publicly responded to the allegation.

During the Uddhav Thackeray-led government (2019–2022), Kharat’s ashram received special permission for irrigation water. A cabinet sub-committee approved the supply of 39 lakh litres from the nearby Darana dam, with an irrigation department proposal to lay 48 km of pipeline. At the time, Jayant Patil—now a senior leader of the NCP (Sharad Pawar) faction—held cabinet rank. Photographs of Patil with Kharat at the ashram have circulated; Patil has made no statement on them.

Photographs of Kharat with Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Fadnavis, and Shinde have also surfaced. In the Assembly debate on March 25, Fadnavis said there would be no inquiry solely on the basis of having a photograph with Kharat.

The SIT has found that Kharat amassed substantial property, including investments in land and real estate. His daughter holds a partnership in a company with the wife of Deputy Collector Abhijit Bhande Patil, an officer who was on deputation with the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA). The General Administration Department has since ordered Bhande Patil to return to the State Secretariat. The SRA falls under the housing ministry, which is held by Eknath Shinde. Bhande Patil had reportedly been posted for at least eight years in positions associated with Shinde’s political domain.

Congress legislative party leader Vijay Wadettiwar alleged that former minister Deepak Kesarkar, who served in the Shinde-led government, had awarded postings to officers on Kharat’s advice. Kesarkar has denied the allegation.

During the Assembly discussion, NCP (Sharad Pawar) MLA Jitendra Awhad alleged that Kharat had been involved in the murder of a journalist, Balu Tupe, in 2007. “Police were well aware about it,” he said. Frontline could not independently verify this claim before publication.

Black magic as political weapon

The most sensational allegations in the case have moved beyond rape and fraud into the territory of occult ritual. Public prosecutor Shailendra Bagade, arguing for police custody, told a Nashik court that the SIT suspected Kharat might be involved in human sacrifices, citing five missing cartridges from his licensed revolver. Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Raut of Shiv Sena (Uddhav Thackeray) used the opening to revisit claims he had made earlier: that Eknath Shinde had sacrificed 21 male buffaloes at the Kamakhya temple in Guwahati to secure the Chief Ministership in 2022, and that buffalo horns had been buried at the official Varsha bungalow, which is why Fadnavis had not moved in after becoming Chief Minister again in December 2024. “All people thought I was not serious. But now the Kharat matter is out, and everyone knows what kind of things are happening in Maharashtra politics,” Raut told Frontline.

Awhad made another striking claim in the Assembly on March 25. He alleged that 38 legislators had cut their fourth finger at Kharat’s instruction, in a ritual meant to precipitate a change of Chief Minister. “I have the names of all the MLAs. I will reveal them at the right time,” he said. He also claimed Fadnavis had known about this for six months. Fadnavis, in his reply, neither confirmed nor denied Awhad’s allegations. “Nothing happens through black magic,” he said. ‘If it were really powerful, Trump would not have gone to war—he would have hired people to do these things instead.’

The political context around Awhad’s claim is not opaque. NCP leader Sunil Tatkare, State chief of the Ajit Pawar faction and a Lok Sabha MP, also came under scrutiny after a photograph showing a bandage on his fourth finger went viral. Tatkare clarified that his finger had been caught in a car door. Chakankar, too, has been photographed with a bandage on her fourth finger; her association with Kharat’s rituals has been cited as the reason.

Awhad and Shinde are both from Thane and are established political rivals. His allegation, without naming Shinde, was widely understood to be directed at him. It fits into a pattern that began to emerge after the Mahayuti alliance returned to power in December 2024: Shinde, who had served as Chief Minister and came into the election with 56 MLAs against the BJP’s 134, was passed over for the top post. Since then, tensions between his faction and the State BJP have flared repeatedly—over local body polls, fund distribution, and ministerial allocation.

Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray posted a pointed comment on this dimension on social media. Addressing Fadnavis directly, he wrote: “I am hearing that to clip the wings of someone’s ambition, this matter will be used. It means, once that person surrenders and stops his political activities, this matter will be thrown in the dustbin.”

The law and its limits

Maharashtra was the first State to pass an anti-superstition law—the Maharashtra Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and other Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Act, enacted in December 2013. The legislation followed the assassination of Dr Narendra Dabholkar on August 20, 2013, in Pune. Dabholkar had campaigned for the law for more than a decade and was shot dead while on a morning walk, just days before the government cleared the ordinance. The mystery of who ordered his murder has not been fully resolved; a court convicted two men in 2024, but questions about the larger conspiracy remain open.

The Kharat case has been charged under that very Act, among other provisions. Yet it has taken two decades for his crimes to reach a court. Senior journalists and sources in Nashik told Frontline that Kharat had operated in the district for nearly 20 years, with political patronage spanning party lines. The SIT’s probe has now reached into land deals, corporate tie-ups, and officer postings—suggesting a network that extended well beyond ritual fraud.

At the end of this legal and political spectacle are the women—hundreds, investigators believe—who visited Kharat genuinely seeking help with a troubled marriage, a sick child, an uncertain job. They were drugged, coerced, filmed, and threatened into silence. Their cases were known to police for years. What changed in March 2026 was not the evidence but the political calculation around it.

Also Read | Maharashtra’s Manas movement

Also Read | The BJP cements its hold in rural Maharashtra