By Sandeep Verma 
Hisar, May 19: Sant Rampal walked out of Hisar Central Jail on a sweltering afternoon eleven years, countless court dates, two murder convictions, and one Supreme Court-level legal marathon later and the first thing that broke the internet was not the release itself. It was the sight of large portable coolers being physically wheeled alongside a 78-year-old man as he shuffled toward a waiting vehicle.
People lost their minds. Understandably.
What The Sant Rampal Release Video Actually Showed At The Gate
The video is short. Maybe a minute, give or take. But it spread faster than most breaking news does these days. On X that chaotic bazaar formerly known as Twitter the clip racked up views by the lakhs within hours. Supporters were crying. Critics were furious. Everyone else was screenshotting the coolers and writing captions.
His followers, some of whom had reportedly been camped near Hisar for days ahead of this moment, received him with the kind of energy you see at election rally victories. Garlands, slogans, the works. On the other side of the same internet, people were asking questions that no one in that celebrating crowd particularly wanted to answer.
Like a man convicted of murder walks out of jail with personal air-conditioning rolling beside him. Does that seem right to you?
That is the question the coolers are really asking. The coolers themselves are not the point. They never were.
Let’s Go Back. Way Back.
Rampal Das that is his full name, the godman bit came later started out as a junior engineer with the Haryana government. Absolutely ordinary background. Government job, modest life, nothing that would hint at what was coming.
Somewhere in the early 1990s, he got drawn into the world of Kabir Panth, the spiritual tradition built around the teachings of Kabir Das, the 15th-century poet-saint who basically spent his life telling people that caste was nonsense and that God did not care about your birth. Rampal took those ideas and built something enormous around them.
And you have to understand why that worked.
Haryana is not a state where caste quietly sits in the background. It shapes who eats where, who marries whom, whose child gets a job. For people at the bottom of that system and there are millions of them a preacher saying that none of it matters, that your birth does not define your worth, that God is equally available to everyone that message hits differently. It travels. It sticks.
By the 2000s, Satlok Ashram in Barwala, Hisar, was not just a religious site anymore. It was a world unto itself. Thousands of live-in followers. Its own internal structure, almost a parallel government in miniature. Followers spread across Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab. A WhatsApp network before WhatsApp existed that kind of word-of-mouth loyalty.
And somewhere in the middle of all that growth, Rampal stopped showing up to court.
The Part Where It All Fell Apart
In 2006, a violent clash between his followers and members of Arya Samaj at his Karontha Ashram in Rohtak left one man dead. He was arrested. Did some time. Got bail. Came out in 2008 and went right back to Barwala like nothing had happened.
Then between 2010 and 2014, he skipped court hearings 42 times. Forty-two. The Punjab and Haryana High Court issued non-bailable warrants. Nothing moved. He stayed inside the ashram. His followers stayed outside it.
November 2014 is when Haryana effectively lost control of the situation.
Police tried to go in and enforce the warrants. What they found was a human wall thousands of his followers physically surrounding the Satlok Ashram, women blocking the entrance, people with lathis, slogans blaring that the police would have to kill one lakh devotees before they touched him.
It lasted days. Real, grinding, ugly days.
When it was finally over, six people were dead. Five women. An eighteen-month-old baby. Journalists who had gone to cover the thing got hurt too. Rampal was eventually carried out in an ambulance on November 19 and taken into custody.
Four years later, in October 2018, a Hisar court convicted him of murder in connection with those deaths. Sentenced him to life. Fined him Rs 2 lakh.
At the time, it felt like something. Like accountability had, for once, not blinked.
Eleven Years Later, A Different Calculation
Time does strange things to even the most definitive-seeming verdicts.
Several of the other cases stacked against Rampal crumbled over the years. The drugs and cosmetics case acquitted, for lack of evidence. The 2006 firing case acquitted again. His lawyers kept going at the sedition case, which had become the last remaining pillar holding him inside.
Earlier this year, a Division Bench of the Punjab and Haryana High Court Justices G.S. Gill and Ramesh Kumari heard his bail plea and said yes. The court looked at how long he had been inside. Looked at his age, 78 years old now. Weighed it all and decided that bail, with conditions, was appropriate.
The conditions are not small. He cannot do anything that leads to large gatherings. Cannot disturb public order. The administration in Hisar was on high alert on the day of his release. The memory of 2014 has not faded from anyone’s mind in that district.
The bail bond was filed. The paperwork moved through the system. And then came the video.
Back To The Coolers For A Second
Here is a genuinely fair point that his supporters make and that deserves to be said plainly. Hisar in May is brutal. We are talking 45-plus degrees on a regular afternoon. An old man, nearly 80, stepping out of over a decade of indoor jail life into that kind of heat yes, there is a real argument that some cooling arrangement was a health necessity, not a luxury. Age and the body’s ability to handle sudden heat exposure are real things.
So why does it bother so many people?
Because it is not really about the temperature. It is about what the image says. Most Indians who leave prison after eleven years leave quietly, with whatever small bag they carried in. Nobody wheels anything alongside them. The coolers, in the video, look less like a health measure and more like a statement intentional or not that this exit was happening on different terms than a normal person’s exit would.
And for a country where the justice system can take decades to deliver a basic verdict for an ordinary family, that visual lands like a slap.
That is the honest truth of why the video is viral. Not because air-conditioning is a crime. But because fairness or the appearance of it is something people are watching very carefully.
His People Are Waiting For Him
Whatever anyone thinks about the legal journey, one thing is not in dispute. The movement Rampal built did not dissolve while he was in prison.
The Satlok Ashram’s online presence kept going. The networks of followers across five states kept communicating. The people who believed in him kept believing. And now that he is out, those millions of followers are going to want to see their leader, hear him speak, be near him.
That is exactly what the court’s conditions are designed to prevent. And that is also exactly where the next chapter of this story gets complicated.
Because a condition on paper is only as good as the administration prepared to enforce it. In 2014, that administration hesitated, delayed, negotiated, and watched as the situation spiralled into violence. Nobody in Hisar wants to see a repeat. But wanting and preventing are different things.
The Part The Cooler Memes Are Covering Up
Five women died at Barwala in 2014. So did an eighteen-month-old child. They did not have portable coolers. They did not have years of legal representation. They do not have trending hashtags today.
Their families have lived with a verdict life imprisonment for the man convicted in connection with their deaths and are now watching that same man walk out because time and age and legal process have produced a bail order. The system worked, in that a conviction happened. The system is also what it is, in that bail is bail.
There is no clean conclusion to that. Just the fact of it, sitting there.
Where Does This Go Now
Sant Rampal is out. He is 78, frail by accounts of those who saw him at the jail gate, and facing a world that has changed considerably since 2014. Smartphones are faster. Crowds can be mobilised in minutes. Courts are also watching more closely.
Whether he rebuilds, whether the ashram structure re-activates around him, whether the conditions attached to his release hold all of that is still unwritten.
What is written is the last eleven years. Six people dead in a standoff that did not need to happen. A conviction that took four years to arrive after the arrest. A bail order that came through on the grounds of age and time served.
And a video of a man walking out of prison with coolers rolling beside him, splitting the internet clean down the middle.
The memes will die down in a few days. The questions underneath them will not.
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- Sandeep Verma
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