Ram Briksha Yadav, the leader of the Swadhin Bharat cult, was on Saturday officially announced to have been dead during the gun battle between sect's members and police on Thursday, in which 24 people – including two police officers – lost their lives.

Yadav, who had been "illegally" living inside the 270-acre camp at Mathura's Jawaharbagh area, with 3,000-odd followers for close to two years, had been claiming to propagate Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose's principles to establish an India free from its elected Prime Minister and President and RBI currency.

In a memorandum to the President of India on December 31, 2014, he invoked the principles of French political analyst Montesquieu and Italian renaissance historian Machievelli, where he talked about "the prosperity and development of the nation" through "rule of law" and "positive jurisprudence". "The idea of state and sovereignty cannot be separated, but after independence the same idea has been lost," he wrote.

But behind his cover of "welfare state", that he mentions in the memorandum, Yadav, who was a follower of god man Jai Gurudev, was apparently pursuing an ambition of becoming a god man himself and establishing his own empire. Yadav wanted to be the heir of Jai Gurudev, who died a few years ago, but not before establishing a sprawling ashram off the Delhi-Agra highway. Yadav, however, lost it to a driver of Jai Gurudev, insiders say.

Stung, he set out to fulfill his ambitions under the garb of Netaji's principles and under the patronage of politicians, who have their own interest of reaping benefits through the god man's large supporter base.

At Jawaharbagh, in 2014, when he came marching from Madhya Pradesh with his followers, Yadav had got permission from the district administration for only two days. But he used his clout to extend the stay.

"They ran a parallel administration inside the 270-acre land. They would forcibly stop non-members to venture near the land. They would threaten people living in adjoining localities to vacate their houses or follow the cult's teachings," lawyer Vijay Pal Singh Tomar, the petitioner who filed the PIL in Allahabad high court and got the orders to vacate the prime land said.

Residents said that every Sunday the cult members would set up a market and sell articles like sugar and vegetables and pulses at cheaper price than the market rate. This is to entice them into following the group's agenda.

Officials claimed that members, once inside the camp, were held captive and were not allowed to venture out on their own will. Boundary walls around the camp were filled with slogans declaring only Azad Hind Bharat's currency and not RBI's were permissible within the country.

Further details that emerged from police sources and corroborated by area residents were alarming. "We saw men crawling up the tree to fire at cops and swiftly crawling down to take target from another tree top. They looked trained in gureilla warfare," said a government official living in Jawahar Bagh Colony, adjacent to the illegal camp.

At dusk on Saturday, inside the Rajkiya Bal Griha (Shishu) in Mathura, the district's child protection home, groups of children played merrily even as the warden tried to convince them it was time to go back to their rooms and pick up their books. Among them, nine had arrived a couple of hours ago and were still settling in. These were few of the 300-odd children who lived in city's Jawaharbagh camp of 'Swadhin Bharat' cult and had separated from their guardians or parents following the violent clash Rest of the children, officials claimed were sent back to their hometowns along with their guardians.

When dna managed to trace and speak with these children, exclusively, they were clueless about where their guardians were. Majority of them belonged to the economically backward districts of Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, supposedly a good catchment area for god men. "I don't know about my grandparents with whom I lived in the camp of for the last one year," said a girl child (name withheld). "I was sleeping late afternoon with my younger brother and woke up to the sound of bullets being fired," said another giving an eyewitness account of the clash. She said her parents were taken away by the police. Another child, on being chatted up, told how they were trained in singing songs that eulogized Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose from whom, the group claimed to draw its inspiration of 'vidhik satyagrah' for a 'swadhin Bharat'.