A popular yoga guru retreated to his plush ashram Sunday claiming the Indian government was out to kill him after police forcibly removed the televangelist from a “fast-unto-death” hunger strike against corruption and scattered tens of thousands of his followers.

The showdown in New Delhi had been building for days, after the saffron-robed, barefoot guru Ram Krishna Ramdev, known as Baba Ramdev, went ahead with his threat to lead a mass hunger strike in the capital.

One of India’s most controversial television lifestyle gurus, Swami “Baba” Ramdev, who claims homosexuality can be “cured” by yoga, plans to transform a remote Scottish Island, Little Cumbrae, into a yoga and traditional teaching centre.

His claims that yoga can treat cancer and HIV have been blasted as “quackery of the highest order” and he has been slammed for giving “false hope to ill people”.