Guru Convicted, Twelve Dead After Riots -- India

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The guru’s Dera Sacha Sauda sect claims to have some 50 million followers and campaigns for vegetarianism and against drug addiction. It has also taken up social causes such as organizing the weddings of poor couples.

Such sects have huge followings in India. It’s not unusual for leaders to have small, heavily armed private militias protecting them.

When the guru left his ashram in Sirsa early Friday for the hearing, he was accompanied by a convoy of more than 180 vehicles, said the Punjab chief minister, Singh.

Police had erected heavy metal barricades topped with barbed wire along main roads in the town, a quiet residential suburb of Chandigarh, which is the common capital of Haryana and Punjab states.

“Why did the Haryana administration allow so many people to gather in Panchkula?” said Singh, the state’s highest elected official and a member of the nation’s main opposition Congress Party, in an apparent dig against the state’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “It is impossible to control such a large hysterical mob.”

Before the verdict was read, Haryana police official B.S. Sandhu had said that army soldiers would march through the streets, but it was not immediately clear if they would carry out that plan.

Authorities ordered Internet and cellphone services shut down across both Haryana and Punjab as a security precaution.

Train services were canceled through the area, leading to railway delays across north India. Schools and colleges were closed.