It is one of the gambits of pro Sathya Sai Baba activists like Indulal Shah (when he was active), Dr G.Venkataraman and his virtual counterpart Gerald Moreno, to portray highly reputed media journalists as sensationalist, and so on. In their offensive and denunciatory style, they fail to credit world leading media journalists, and the researchers as well, with a sharp eye and habits of careful checking into the credentials of the former devotees and other critics who have shared their accounts. The journalists work, for example, for the BBC, CBC, CNN, SBS, ABC, India Today, Times of London, Telegraph, Guardian, The Age, and newspapers in Europe and Canada.
It is a version of the Orwellian “Four legs good, two legs bad!” In George Orwell’s classic novella ‘Animal Farm’, Rule #1. (for the animals contra the human beings) is: “Whatever goes upon two feet is an enemy”. In the Venkatarman-Moreno nomenclature: All former devotees and other critics who dissent from Sathya Sai Baba are wrong. Likewise all highly reputed media who investigate and report critically.
Both these individuals can be shown conclusively to have borne false witness against former devotees, notwithstanding that the latter have, many of them for decades, been in good standing as deeply committed workers among Sathya Sai Baba’s faithful. Suddenly: All legs who have not walked away, good. All who have walked away, in dissenting, bad.
David and Faye Bailey
In short, individuals like David Bailey and his wife Faye are deemed to be bad. This is a man to whom Sathya Sai Baba gave extraordinarily such grave responsibilities, not only in care, as a lecturer in Music at his university, of students whom Sai Baba holds to be the ‘apple of his eye’, but also in David Bailey’s rare status of being a travelling emissary at Sai Baba’s behest to various parts of the world. Indeed, it was as he travelled that individuals in good standing would come up and privately share their terrible accounts. But Bailey dissented from Sathya Sai Baba and those core leaders who were found to have been covering up for him for many decades.
Therefore, Bailey bad. Bailey to be denounced. Bailey to be defamed.
Faye Bailey, who Sathya Sai Baba chose as bride for David Bailey and himself presided over their wedding, was a widely known and respected figure in the Sathya Sai Organization in Australia. Like David, Faye Bailey was privy to ever-increasing direct, personal accounts of those – or, in other cases, the parents or closely related others – with harrowing accounts of Sathya Sai Baba’s sexual abuse of boys and young men over many years, and various other most shocking types of abuses more widely. Again, in the Orwellian schemata referred to above, Faye Bailey bad. Faye Bailey to be denounced and defamed.
For years, people = good, when close to Sathya Sai Baba; suddenly, as if they have become devils overnight, those same people = bad!
It has been the discovery of each independent third party like the media mentioned above, and like those independent scholars who have tried to research it, that the Sathya Sai Organization leaders are engaged in a powerful suppression of information about itself, and about the many worldwide allegations.
For the long, well-researched Salon.com article (25 July, 2001) the noted US journalist Michelle Goldberg travelled to India, and also interviewed witnesses in various countries. Ms Goldberg wrote of David and Faye Bailey’s ‘The Findings’:
“Part of the nearly 20,000-word piece is given over to evidence that Sai Baba fakes his materializations and doesn’t magically heal the sick — revelations that seem self-evident to nonbelievers but provoke fierce debate in devotee circles and blazing headlines in the Indian press. Most of “The Findings” consists of testimony of sexual harassment and sexual abuse. “Whilst still at the ashram, the worst thing for me — as a mother of sons — occurred when a young man, a college student, came to our room, to plead with David, ‘Please Sir, do something to stop him sexually abusing us,'” Faye writes. “These sons of devotees, unable to bear their untenable position of being unwilling participants in a pedophile situation any longer, yet unable to share this with their parents because they would be disbelieved, placed their trust in David; a trust which had built over his five years as a visiting professor of music to the Sai college.” These pleas eroded the Baileys’ faith and finally made them go public”.
Notes, drawn from Wikipedia, on Michelle Goldberg:
Born 1975
Buffalo, New York
Education Masters Degree in journalism from UC Berkeley
Occupation Journalist, Author
Michelle Goldberg (born 1975) is a liberal Brooklyn-based journalist and the author of the books Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World. She is formerly a contributing writer at Salon.com[1] and currently a blogger at The Huffington Post. Her work has been published in the magazines Rolling Stone and In These Times, and in The New York Observer, The Guardian, Newsday, and other newspapers.[2] She also writes an online column for The American Prospect.
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This article on the Baileys is to be continued
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Further Resources
- “The Secret Swami” – BBC Film Footage and Transcript
General
Excerpt From Public Petition (With Barry Pittard’s comments)
(Note: You may prefer to proceed straight to the Petition):
Public Petition For Official Investigations of Sathya Sai Baba and His Worldwide Organization
Call For Media and Government Investigation 