Edamaruku can document how ashrams are often dogged by intrigue and infighting. He exemplifies this with the case of the head of one of 14 akharas, Mahant Desahari Giri, who was abducted in 1995 and disappeared. In the mid-1990s, the head of an ashram in Hardwar was shot dead. Add to this the infamouse case of Swami Premananda who was condemned to two life sentences by the High Court (after appeals) for the rape and murder of young ladies in his Tiruvannamalia ashram in Tamil Nadu.
The founder the socio-religious sect Ananda Marg, Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, a railway accounts clerk, was arrested on a murder charge in 1971. He was acquitted in 1978 by the Patna High Court. Later, rivalry broke forth in the 1990s within Ananda Marga, its members divided into a Bihar and a Bengal camps, each trying to wrest control of the organisation and culminating in a bloody clash between the rivals in Puruliain 1983.