The Mystification of Sathya Sai Baba Devotees

Recently,  Sathya Sai Baba devotees have suffered terrible shocks. To devotees with any reasoning capabilities intact, no amount of Sathya Sai Central Trust’s spin-doctoring will do.  It is little wonder that some leaders in the Sathya Sai Organization with more developed democratic tendencies have long fell foul of those such as Indulal Shah. The difficulty here was always there was the thought that Shah and other leaders, however autocratic and unpleasant their manner, were, after all, but mouth-pieces for Sathya Sai Baba. Little did they know …..

Many followers were forced to consider that those servitors, handpicked by Sathya Sai Baba himself, have been party to extremely unaccountable, poor explanations surrounding his sickness and death. They learn, if they did not already know, or else had forgotten, that he foretold that he would die circa 2022 AD. It could not be lost on at least some devotees that many of his prophecies and promises did not materialise. Such anomalies were many.

In the extraordinary confusion of the recent events, the Central Trust tried to explain matters away. However (most sensibly from their point of view) they quickly reverted to their old ruse of saying nothing, and occasionally almost nothing.

What happens commonly with psychological trauma happens, of course, with Sai Baba followers, too. The victims go into psychological denial more intense than they have ever experienced.  After ignoring the extensive documentation of former devotees and other critics of Sai Baba for over a decade, devotees at last got to learn of Sathya Sai Baba’s incredible secrecy, and that of his leaders.

To be sure, what former devotees and other critics of Sathya Sai Baba did not know was the incredible hoarding of billions in various currencies and gold, silver and precious gems, and many luxury goods, the latter of which have been mouldering away in a manner not entirely unlike, I have suggested, poor Miss Havisham’s circumstances in Charles Dickens’ novel ‘Great Expectations’: When Perfumes Reek: Lavish Scents, Shampoos etc., Among Sai Baba Secret Treasure Hoard. Posted by Barry Pittard on July 24, 2011

The events leading up to Sai Baba’s death, the death itself, and the aftermath of infighting about the succession by his chief servitors, became known throughout India – namely, Satyajit (alias Yatish Salian, Sai Baba’s longtime paramour and favourite), V. Srinivasan, and R.J.Ratnakar –

Satyajit (Yatish Salian), Sathya Sai Baba Favorite

about all of whom there is much mystification among many Sathya Sai Baba devotees. See:  Sathya Sai Trust’s R.J.Ratnakar – Long Police Interrogation. Intensive Investigations Continue. Posted by Barry Pittard on June 26, 2011.

The events were so newsworthy that a media which – unlike the international press to whom a number of us long ago convinced of the worthiness of our accounts of Sathya Sai Baba  –  has almost entirely to the last press baron failed to expose Sathya Sai Baba and his authoritarian cult.

The Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust’s R.J.Ratnakar, Sai Baba’s Nephew. Effective Sai Trust Supremo.

Here is the earlier type of presentation that Ratnakar would now clearly like the public to forget all about. It is a statement a prominent spokesman for Trustees and the Council of Management,V.Srinivasan, chairman of WS Industries, Chennai, South India, made on the same day as the Central Trust made its tediously waffling major public statement, couched verbatim, in this portion, in both cases:  

“In the light of baseless, irresponsible and false accusations of defalcation of gold, valuable artefacts and even money, it is emphatically stated that the accusations are wholly untrue and it is believed these have been engineered by certain vested interests”. (Economic Times article:  ‘Baba had no successor in mind: Trustees, election for Sai Trust chairman next week’, Apr 28, 2011, 09.53pm IST).

Further Reading

Sathya Sai Baba Scandal: View RJ Ratnakar’s Body Language In NDTV Interview On Sai Trust ‘Transparency’. Posted by Barry Pittard on June 29, 2011

NOTE:  Writers on the Sathya Sai saga, like Robert Priddy, Brian Steel and myself have long exposed the tissues of lies that Sai Trust officials spin to devotees at large and to others. But what devotees were prepared to use their critical faculties in the least? Very few indeed. Against all their knowledge down the years that we were not (as Sai Baba said of us) ‘Demons’, ‘Judases’, and that we had paltry money motives, they mindlessly preferred to listen to the deceitful avowals of leaders such as Indulal Shah, Dr Michael  Goldstein – see: Sathya Sai Baba Chief, Dr Goldstein, Explodes. “I am the consummate professional” (See Film Clips), Dr G. Venkataraman, and so on – see:Robert Priddy and Barry Pittard On Dr G. Venkataraman – Sathya Sai Baba Global Propagandist

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The Clay Feet Of The ‘God-Emperor’ – Sathya Sai Baba

It is fun to read to our children Hans Christian Anderson’s famous fable of the Emperor Without Clothes. We smile WITH the children at how we all ‘get’ the ‘morale de la fable’. And we smile AT the silliness of the emperor and at his subjects until they all began to wise up.  But do we adults ever really ‘get it’? Do we ever wise up?  And truly grow up? Is the Anderson tale to be kept for the bedtime story hour and phase or do we keep on learning its lesson life-long? Or never learning it.

The Emperor's New Clothes. Hans Christian Anderson Fable

Already, we see how – despite all the recent and glaring revelations – many Sathya Sai Baba followers clutch at irrational explanations for his illnesses, his long descent into physical and mental decrepitude, his secret hoarding, his repeatedly failed predictions and promises, his building up around him an imperial opulence in a land of tragic squalor and misery, his choice of so many leaders that Sai devotees well know to be egotistical bullies ….. and so on.

Sathya Sai Baba is the ’emperor’ exposed.

But then, in our vulnerability to conmanship that knows how to manipulate using the power of mythology and religiosity, we too are exposed. We are hungry for leaders who can tell us what to do and what to think. An act of quiet heroism of which we may be capable is to look good and hard at ourselves and the way we reach out to, and cling to, external heroes, and find it hard to see that they – and ALL of us – because human, have feet of clay in one way or another. I do not suggest a long study – flipping through Freud and Jung and Adler, Fromm, and all the rest. For to do so can be but another way of spending those valuable seconds or minutes when we can, easily enough, catch ourselves out in our own silliness. The libraries of the world have not yet sufficed in wising us up in fundamental matters, for we search for books just as we search for gurus and belief systems. Anything but look at ourselves. It would be better simply to fetch a copy of the Hans Christian Anderson tale, and then keep driving the question:  how does this story apply to me – in my craziness?!

But no, anything but work on the craziness-spotting and the corrections – both of which become so obvious. What happens when we stand back for a few moments, and realise that we have been banging our heads against a brick wall without knowing it?  What? Need we rush out for a book? A guru? Why not start with the magnificent in situ opportunity to spot, and to change, the silliness? Of books and of gurus and of belief systems there is no end. But will we glance at the ‘book’ of ourselves. A few moments of introspection/self-correction will not perform anything like the number of flashy miracles attributed to Sathya Sai Baba. Only one now and then, but it is more than enough.

Of course, Sathya Sai Baba pretended to be God incarnate, and many of us fell for it, right down, face first, at his feet. At the clay feet of a human being, after all.

Do we, in fact, only appear to grow up? As our children increasingly understand the upshot of the Anderson fable, do we notice, from time to time, our children’s wry smiles at us? Which, unless we get wise, may one day turn to ridicule and alienation?

Blindness, naivety in the face of the increasingly obvious – namely that the emperor has tricked both himself and us – comes with the territory of belief. That belief-terrain seems so comforting, but its ‘safety’ is dangerous. It lulls and dulls and suppresses our life that could be far better lived. 

Commonly, belief is found in our running after charismatic religious or political or other types of leaders. In our excitation – and in that of the leaders – we fail to see how these leaders exploit and manipulate. BUT – still more important – we fail to realise how we have given over our own minds to them, and to the beliefs. To the ideological systems that they embody.

Children are very obvious in their penchant for their heroes – splendid types who can do no wrong or if so can right that wrong. As you and I may flatteringly – and even alarmingly – have found, even we can be our children’s heroes – “You are the best Mummy/Daddy in the world”. But if we do not get over our hero-worship, and our clinging to the ‘heroic’ figures, what sort of human beings are we bound to become?

One of the great discomforts – AND, in a way, comforts – I felt when a follower of Sathya Sai Baba was that here I was with all these “Sai brothers and sisters”. What discomforted was the intrusive thought – but this elevates the importance of some human beings over the importance of one’s relationship with ALL human beings.

All being well, we grow out of infantilism to some manageable extent. However, it can appear – without our being aware of it – in the guise of the beliefs that human beings clingingly attach to this guru or that guru, this ism or that ism, this system or that system.

Where is the brotherhood or sisterhood in this?

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Rank-and-file Sathya Sai Organization Members Are Also Culpable

Each of us is responsible for his or her own actions. Irrespective of any mitigating circumstances.

If ever there were a time for the introspection Sai Baba himself advocated that his devotees should do, it is now. He, moreover, taught that they should not become attached to his form. Or his miracles. And yet here, precisely, is the devotees’ great stumbling blog. They do not do what he asked them to do. And, of course, he did not do what he asked THEM to do. 

From many countries worldwide, those who left Sathya Sai Baba and his charismatic cult have had to face at least three major torments:  The first was shock. For some, the shock was particularly acute. Namely, for the survivors of his –  and in some cases, his trusted aides’ – sexual and other abuses. Certain of his college and university teachers were among the perpetrators of these abuses. Because of the tenacity – and financial means – of a family in which two boys were the sexual abuse survivors, one of these (so-called ‘teachers’) has been stopped in his tracks.

Then came the grieving. One of the tormenting dilemmas was that of parents who, having investigated the accounts of their own or of others devotee families stricken by the abuses, were left with the situation of having young children and other family or friends who still worshipped and adored Sathya Sai Baba.

A group of us, including very qualified sexual abuse therapists, addressed a number of tasks. One of the first needs was to attempt to alert and warn. Commencing in 1999, this we did via former devotee networks, hoping (naively, as it appears to me in retrospect) that devotees would heed those who had long been respected workers (some of them, very high-profile leaders) in the international Sathya Sai Baba organization. We made extensive, high level representations to the foreign services in various countries, to UNESCO, Interpol, various institutions which the Sathya Sai Baba Organization had begun to forge links, and to the international media.

Some former devotees were fortunate to have supportive friends and colleagues.  There was, inevitably, the struggle to maintain efficiency in one’s family, professional and social life. Those who were retired had, in some ways, an advantage, for they were able to do the inner processing of grief. This group had also faced many of life’s other struggles, and from it emerged those who were able to bring insight and maturity to others who were younger and often without the deeper perspective or, indeed, being hamstrung by studies or a young family to raise etc., the time in which to process the grieving.

In recent months many devotees themselves now question the behavior of officials on the Sathya Sai Central Trust. Not only have they had to face the death of their ‘God’ – years before the time he foretold. They have had to acknowledge that he had secretly hoarded in his sealed-off living quarters, vast billions in various currency, along with huge caches of precious gold, stones and other luxury items. This has received enormous coverage in the major media in India, and some internationally.  Among devotees, there is now deep concern about officials on the Sathya Sai Central Trust. Some are believed to have acted well, and others badly, and even criminally.

Many Sai Baba Devotees Now Know About The Untrustworthy Sathya Sai Central Trust.

For over a decade, we have said that there was a sore need for accountability, transparency and duty of care. Devotees ignored and reviled us, showing nothing of the truth, right conduct, peace and love that they forever speak about. They abandoned, as did he, their teacher’s admonition to ‘help ever, hurt never’. They continued to worship and support one who allowed to be erected all around him the symbols of imperial splendour. They knew there were countless anomalies, failed prophecies, failed promises of healing, failed undertakings to give their children a place in his college ….

They knew that many of his leaders were nasty, autocratic, ego-tripping bullies. Some knew of apartments’ scandals, and that officials in his front office were deaf to the pleas of those who had been duped out of money they had paid for the apartments. Many knew (and would only whisper among themselves about) that there have been cover ups of accidental deaths, suspicious deaths, suicides, and the killings in Sathya Sai Baba’s private quarters in 1993. Some relate cases of brutality, including those exercised against college students.

The chances are that many of these culpable devotees will forever succeed in hiding their shame. But it is the duty of others to remind them of their responsibilities as citizens and as human beings with any claim to having a heart.

One does not even hear the word “Sorry” from them – for all their so-called righteousness.

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Further Reading

David Bailey and Thomas Wiehe. Transcript Of Phone Link: Sathya Sai Abuses

Sathya Sai Baba Critic Serguei Badaev: An Incisive Voice of Conscience From Russia

The Late Leo Boogaard: A Dutch Voice of Conscience On Sathya Sai Baba

(Late) Ron and Peggy Laing: Deeply Alienated From Sathya Sai Organization

Top UK Sathya Sai Organization leaders left Sathya Sai Baba

Letter from Stephen Carthew

Letter from Stephen Carthew

New Zealand Lawyer Exposes Official Cover Up of Killings In Sathya Sai Baba Bedroom

Sathya Sai Baba Organization’s Betrayal of Love and Compassion

Dr Naresh Bhatia. Silenced Now In Indian Child Abuse Scourge

Public Petition For Official Investigations of Sathya Sai Baba and His Worldwide Organization

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UK In Flames. But Not India. Anna Hazare Sets Example Of Peaceful Protest

It is known that many parts India can be a political tinderbox waiting for a spark. And yet vast numbers of Indian people, irrespective of caste, education, age, political or religious affiliation are pouring onto the streets in peaceful protest against the jailing of Anna Hazare, the 74-year old anti-corruption crusader. Students and teachers are vacating their classrooms, lawyers, their courts, shopkeepers, their shops, and so on. The phenomenon is monumental.

A curious reader can search beyond the main Indian city dailies, and will find that the mass protests are spreading far, wide and deep in India.

In Europe, the surging triumphs of the 1848 ‘revolutions’ were effectively suppressed within a year. If Indians persist, if they can manage to calm down the hotheads, perhaps great change can be effected in that tragic country, where incredibly greedy elites have for so long entrenched themselves in power. Behind all the smiles and ostensible courtesy, there are the demagoguery, violence, religion, secret government, nepotism, bribery and blackmail, etc., which are just some of the tools by which they maintain control.

The present anti-corruption protests may, however, may be India’s last chance for peaceful change. Nothing succeeds like failure.

Anna Hazare. Man of peace in Gandhian tradition

The Manmohan Singh government, amidst many corruption scandals (to be measured in almost unimaginable billions of dollars), has been bent on watering down an anti-corruption Bill proposed by Anna Hazare and his team. It is as though Singh and his advisors fail to see that the writing is on the wall for them. He and they are now clearly running scared, willfully oblivious to the vastness of pan Indian frustration and anger at the decades of endemic corruption. Yesterday,V. Kalyanam, personal secretary to Mahatma Gandhi, addressing a group of young people, said:

“India will get a sure gold medal if corruption is entered as an item in the Olympic Games,” Kalyanam told the audience. “We may not be a force in football or athletics or hockey. But India is the undisputed global leader in corruption …. These ministers and politicians forget the fact that it is we who elect them and they are our servants”.

V. Kalyanam. Mahatma Gandhi's Secretary Speaks Out, 16 Aug. 2011, Against India's Endemic Corruption

The DNA report states:

“Referring to Anna Hazare’s arrest in New Delhi, Kalyanam said it was easier to fight foreign tyranny than the tyranny of our own people. He ridiculed the contention of Union ministers like Kapil Sibal and Chidambaram that Parliament was supreme and civil society has no voice”.

Our own Expose Team knows to its cost how soundly and with what contempt Manmohan Singh and his aides have thwarted both Indian and foreign requests for investigation into Sathya Sai Baba and his cult. Among other examples of riding roughshod over many petitioners’ responsible representations, the British High Commissioner was rebuffed.

More recently, we learn for example that Manmohan Singh’s Home Minister P.Chidambaram and his son have been involved in behind-the-scenes machinations in regard to the leadership succession – on the side of the exposed Sathya Sai Central Trust head R.J.Ratnakar – about whom there is great concern among many Sathya Sai Baba devotees at large. See:  Sathya Sai Trust’s R.J.Ratnakar – Long Police Interrogation. Intensive Investigations Continue. Posted by Barry Pittard on June 26, 2011. It was the same Chidambaram who made the incredibly crass statement, condemned around the world, that the terrorist attack on Mumbai on 26 November, 2008 was “not an intelligence failure”.

P.Chidambaram, with Manmohan Singh - Sathya Sai Baba Men

My reader may also recall that Chidambaram followed yet another power backer of Sathya Sai Baba, Shivraj Patil. The latter presided over an extreme failure in his intelligence agencies to be alert to the terrorist threat. Patil’s disastrous mishandling of the whole affair forced Manmohan Singh, out of sheer political embarrasment, to sack him. But it was one Sathya Sai Baba man out and another Sathya Sai Baba man in.

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See yesterday’s blog:  Anna Hazare’s Arrest. Dark Days For Indian Democracy

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Back Story –to Shivraj Patil who, along with Chidambaram, has long been a powerful force for suppression of many ugly facts about Sathya Sai Baba and some of his key servitors.

Shivraj Patil. Fallen Indian Home Minister, Sathya Sai Baba Man

Shivraj Patil Falls From Home Ministry

Shivraj Patil – Sai Baba worshipper – resigns

“No fear of bombs” in India, Said Sai Baba a Week Before Mumbai Terrorist Attack

Terrorist smoke casts Pall Over India and the World, despite Sathya Sai Baba’s assurances that all is well with India in regard to terrorist attacks.

Shivraj V. Patil  was a signatory to a letter condemning those who have stood forth (at great personal sacrifice in many cases, be it said!).  In a joint public letter (December 2001), Bhagwati along with the former Prime Minister of India of the right-wing BJP, A.B. Vajpayee, and another former Chief Justice of India, Ranganath Mishra, and three others including Patil wrote a public letter stating that contentions of Sai Baba’s dissenters represent a:

“wild, reckless and concocted allegations made by certain vested interests and people against Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba”.                                                     

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Anna Hazare’s Arrest. Dark Days For Indian Democracy

Indian democracy? It would be a good idea!

A longtime Indian acquaintance has just emailed, recording his deep concern at the arrest by the Manmohan Singh government of Anna Hazare, an immensely courageous and peaceful activist calling for an end to rampant government corruption.

India’s gerontocratic leaders have learnt little about genuine processes of democracy. They learn nothing from the ‘Arab spring’. Nor even for her own reasons, last century, for risking all in opposing British Rule. Nor do they learn from the 1848 revolutions in Europe, and what, for the lack of learning lessons, was to culminate in two mammoth conflagrations in the twentieth century. Their dangerous power game is like dice thrown in hell, where everyone loses.

Like Sathya Sai Baba, his follower Manmohan Singh, and many other Indian leaders across the political spectrum, are yesteryear’s men – autocratic, and pretendedly democratic. Indian parliaments are, now and then, in terrible uproar that shocks a more urbane world. Some Indian government security forces make large departures from the conduct of an army which was, in many ways, loved and trusted by the Indian people – unlike many of her cruel police, who have for so long been despised. Manmohan Singh will need to go. But to what purpose if those who replace him are, also, yesteryear’s men (and occasional women)?

This  correspondent writes:

“Blackest day in India for democracy and civil rights. Gandhian
activist Anna Hazare leading a peaceful “India against corruption”
movement, has been arrested along with hundreds of anti corruption
activists. On its 64th anniversary of Independence. With millions of
Indians expressing support for Anna Hazare’s proposed fast unto death
movement against corruption, a panicked Manmohan Singh/Sonia Gandhi
govt, enforced prohibitory orders against all Indian laws and
constitution, and arrested Hazare at 7AM this morning.

This is a shameful and disgraceful day for democracy and honesty, in
India. Most Indians cringed in shame and shock when Sai Baba was given
a state funeral , complete with a gun salute by buglers, and the
NATIONAL flag draped around his body….can there be a greater shame,
disgrace and insult to freedom fighters, soldiers who had sacrificed
their lives and to the Indian flag ??? NO. But India watched
helplessly as a corrupt PM Manmohan Singh ordered it…..and today the
same corrupt govt that was supporting Sai baba, and was supported by
him for years…..and having looted , raped, and plundered the nation
to the tune of more than $ 60 billions in just 4 years, has brutally
clamped down on a peaceful anti corruption movement.

India is taking to the streets….as I type this….tens of thousands
of common folks across 25 cities are out on the streets , marching and
courting arrest, in support of Anna Hazare….the whole nation is
galvanized …..and the Govt under seize….lets hope Indian people
take back their country from this corrupt dacoit group who is running
the country now…”

Although criticized for thinking it possible that the protests led by a number of Indian leaders – somewhat cast in the Gandhian mode – opened the possibility, sooner or later, for Watergate-style revelations of high level government corruption – in the article, Could Sathya Sai Treasury Scandals Lead to India’s Watergate? Posted by Barry Pittard on June 23, 2011, I earlier wrote:

“Frighteningly, what Manmohan Singh so gravely risks is that, because he has shown his teeth to peaceful anti-corruption protesters – or to be more accurate – got his security forces and police to do the tooth-showing and bovvyer boy musclework, his piddling weakness in the face of immense corruption could plunge the Indian nation into the most terrible bloodshed. By which I mean – he should fix cankerous corruption in his own house, and not ‘fix’ honest and decent protesters.

However, I am encouraged by a number of tidal changes that I now see.

Quite apart from his deep prostrating, longtime association with Sathya Sai Baba, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh now looks to be a spent force. His government is mired in many scandals. Given the evidence so long in front of international former devotee coordinators like Robert Priddy and myself, one can really raise a question:  Will the revelations now exploding in the Indian media about Sai Baba and key players on his Sai Central Trust broaden out to include some of the figures in local, state and central government spheres?

India’s PM Manmohan Singh. At the Feet of the Late Sathya Sai Baba

Might Manmohan Singh and others be about to face their Watergate? 

It will be a test of what the producer of the BBC’s ‘The Secret Swami”, Eamon Hardy, threw into question, to use his words, of “India’s maturity as a democracy”.

Manmohan Singh and other members of his government, and a succession of past Prime Ministers and Presidents, and countless other high-ranking individuals in Indian politics, the armed services, police, government, and so on, have protected Sathya Sai Baba. Will, now, the wealth, the family connections, the underhand political wheeler-dealing and other antidemocratic tendencies in India thwart attempts at genuine reform? Will the big Sai Baba-prostrating money-bags like the Tatas, the Rais (the scion of the latter family threatened to sue us and got told firmly where to go!) at last, after too many decades, find that there is something in India that money won’t buy?

Or will the legions of corrupt misleaders continue to overpower democracy? Here is our chance to see.

Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi by Sathya Sai Baba’s golden casket

Large numbers of Indian citizens are rising up. Are they rent-a-crowds fomented by his immediate political rivals to power? Or by the Pakistan government’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)? It would not surprise if any or all of these should want to have a hand. But good Indian citizens inform me that many of these marches against government corruption are deeply genuine, no matter under whose banner the crowds protest.

Some masses rally to the call of solid, old-fashioned anti-corruption crusaders such as Anna Hazare. Others to Swami Ram Dev, whom a range of serious commentators depict as somewhat a religious fundamentalist, politically naive, and a bit of a hot-head, but well-meaning and brave nonetheless. Certainly, both have daily put their lives on the line. Both have also embarked on fasts-unto-death, in the way the better-informed still remember of Mahatma Gandhi”.

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New Delhi, August 16, 2011

Anna Hazare’s arrest sparks off angry protests, both Houses adjourned

Gargi Parsai

The Hindu Anna Hazare’s supporters block traffic after the social activist was detained in New Delhi on Tuesday. Photo: S. Subramanium

Related

 NEWS

Govt defends police action against Hazare and his team Hazare’s detention is rehearsal of emergency: Nitish Team Hazare to move Supreme Court against detentions Not surprised at Hazare’s detention: Advani Anna Hazare detained ahead of protest fast It’s the beginning of second freedom struggle: Hazare

TOPICS

crime, law and justice corruption & bribery
justice and rights
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In an early morning swoop, the Delhi Police picked up social activist Anna Hazare from his residence here just as he was preparing to leave for Gandhi Samadhi at Rajghat ahead of his fast at JP park to press for a strong anti-corruption Lokpal Bill.

“Second freedom struggle”

“This is the second fight for freedom and this movement will not halt now,’’ said Mr. Hazare as he was whisked away with several supporters trying to stop the vehicle that carried him to the officers’ mess at civil lines. He was later sent to Tihar jail after he reportedly refused to offer surety for his bail before a magistrate.

“We have orders from higher up,” said the detaining officer when Mr. Hazare asked him what his crime was. Team Hazare was denied permission to stage his indefinite fast and prohibitory orders were imposed at the venue after they refused to comply with all the riders imposed by the police.

The arrest sparked off angry, widespread protests with reports of people courting arrests from different parts of the country and opposition parties slamming the move as an attack on democratic and civil rights of citizens.

Both the houses of Parliament were adjourned over the issue.

Along with Mr. Hazare, other key members of the India Against Corruption movement including Arvind Kejriwal, Shanti Bhushan, Kiran Bedi and Manish Sisodia were also detained from different venues. About 1,300 supporters were detained in Delhi alone.

In a terse statement made to the press, Home Secretary R.K. Singh said Mr. Hazare was detained because he said he was going to defy prohibitory orders.

With opposition parties and activists likening the government action to the emergency imposed in the country in 1975, Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee came before the media to say that while everyone had the right to protest, were the police to perceive a law and order situation, it could impose conditions. Union Ministers P. Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal and Ambika Soni also addressed the media to express similar views.

Attack on democratic rights: Brinda

Blasting the government, CPI (M) leader Brinda Karat said the detentions were an attack on democratic rights of the people which the government should re-consider. “We totally reject the argument that because the Lokpal Bill was in Parliament, there can be no protests on it. If it is so, then even the Women’s Reservation Bill is before Parliament and there are so many protests over it. Did the government accuse them even once as it has Anna Hazare?”

Terming it as a “sad day” for Indian democracy, BJP leader Arun Jaitley said the move shows that the UPA is a government in panic and has over-reacted. “Do a group of citizens who disagree with the government have the right to protest and dissent or not or have we abandoned civil rights and the right to protest in this country?’’

“Rehearsal of emergency”

In Patna, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar described Mr. Hazare’s detention as “murder of democracy’’ and said it was a “rehearsal of emergency” which the people will never tolerate.

Addressing a joint press conference, lawyer Prashant Bhushan said he was going to move the Supreme Court against the action, while Swami Agnivesh called upon the government to withdraw the “repressive measures’’ and hold a dialogue with the civil society group.

Activist Medha Patkar said while there were several movements as theirs under the banner of the National Alliance of People’s Movements, but Anna Hazare had come to be a representative of all anti-corruption struggles. She said to say that the Bill was before Parliament and therefore there should be no protests on this was wrong. “After all, it was Parliament that passed the Bill on setting up Special Economic Zones.’’

Baba Ramdev, whose demonstration against corruption was lathi-charged by the Delhi Police in June, said this government was “dictatorial, cruel and manipulative’’.

Keywords: Anna Hazare arrest, Anna Hazare fast, JP Park, Jan Lokpal, anti-corruption movement, India Against Corruption, civil society, Parliament boycott

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Article Series Asks Sathya Sai Alumni To Admit Large-Scale Male Sexual Abuse

The following excerpts are from my recent article series, the main burthen of which to say that alumni of Sathya Sai education institutions now have a unique opportunity. I was a lecturer, (1978-1979), at the Sathya Sai College, outside Bangalore, South India.  By showing fearlessness, truthfulness and compassion for those who suffer – virtues endlessly preached in Sai institutions – they can tear aside the veil of taboo against addressing sexual abuse.

What members of the international Sathya Sai Organization have to face is that Sathya Sai Baba’s very accomplices in sexual and other abuses are still in positions of power. Therefore, it should not be thought that the death of Sathya Sai Baba has, in some way, made the problem go away.

It is a suppression extremely prevalent in India. But, then, extreme conditions are those in which courage in straight speaking and clear moral action are called for. Since, like many teachers everywhere, my fond hopes for my former students to turn out well, have never died, I would dearly wish to see them vividly live those vivid speeches that Sai Baba’s handpicked students would give. Perhaps forever doomed to disappointment will be those many listeners who have fondly thought that the rousing speeches of these students predicted waves of Vivekananda-like sages.

Rationally, it appears that these alumni will never thus aspire. But then, if the fond heart were not stronger than the domains of rational discourse, humankind would never had its few glorious breakthroughs. Let us see what the next year or so will bring, now that one of Sathya Sai Baba’s former and most highly senior teachers has been exposed as a sexual abuser of those tender lives which their parents put into Sai Baba’s and his teachers’ keeping.

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Up and Coming:  An Article – offered for my use at ‘Call For Media and Government Investigation of Sathya Sai Baba – by a psychotherapist well familiar with the issue of sexual abuse perpetrated by Sathya Sai Baba and his accomplices.

——————————————————–

Nancy Wake, WW2 Australian Heroine – A Timeless Role Model

…. I now suggest they read for fifteen minutes or preferably longer about Nancy Wake. It strikes me that they may be more ready, after all their years of frigid inaction, and witnessing the vast pomp and disgusting glitter and falsity of Puttaparthi, to decide that it is time to do something strong and decent which will challenge India and the world to face and address the great pestilence of sexual abuse ….. and also start to honor, in their own commitment to courage in social change, the example given to them by the great Indian role models so often exalted in that country in flowery speeches but not emulated – e.g., Rani Lakshmi Bai, Sarojini Naidu, Sucheta Kripalani, Mahatma Gandhi, Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari, Sardar Vallabhai Patel, Subhas Chandra Bose ……

Sexual Abusers Must Be Convicted And A Public Educated (the Sai Baba Saga)

Reconciliation is all about taking an unhappy set of circumstances, and making a ‘clean breast’ of matters. To my old students of the Sathya Sai College at Whitefield, via Bangalore, South India, I say (remembering the love so many of you held for the great holy rivers of India) that this does not simply mean dipping in the Yamuna, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Godavari, Narmada, Kaveri and so on. You may splash all you like, but it does not mean that you can so blithely throw off your feet-on-the ground citizenship, in which all citizens need to be earthed and interconnected, if civil society is going to work for the common good, and if heaven, here or beyond here, is worth reaching for.

Nothing succeeds like success. Nothing succeeds like failure, either, if you are not strong. Will you be strong these days? You may be surprised how our ranks are re-forming. You may yet get your chance to make some light-filled and enduring contributions to civil society. Robert Priddy and I are simply faces to be seen. (It is more effective this way, for the while – NOT YET to put any Indian face to these developments). Enough to say, there are many other former devotees across many trades and professions and areas of study who wish to see good come out of the evil that has been done.

In short, you now have a chance to assist former Sai devotee parents, ex-students and various well-wishers, who are determined to shake off what is bad in the Sathya Sai legacy, and to assert what is positive and good in all times and places.

Sathya Sai Alumni Need To Speak Out. Hiding Maintains A Culture Of Dirt

And years later, I heard that your beloved English lecturer PK (Mohanty), my dear and esteemed colleague,  got cast out. Why? Because, it is my understanding, his was one small voice strong in defence of your innocence. Think back to others, whom you happen to know were not ‘bad eggs’  who got cast out. Think back, too, to the boys whose parents withdrew their boys from college. Think of all the hush-hush that went on about it. This form of thinking back that has triggered off the questioning process in others. Boys whom you held dear were lambs to the slaughter. I can tell you, if you do not already know it – they suffer terribly now. There is a terrible legacy of sexual confusion, relationship difficulty, and great spiritual and moral betrayal.

The Upside Down Chair In A Sathya Sai Baba College

Well, boys, or men – if that is what you are! – I trust that all your children are safe and well, and stricken by no predator. Would that I could visit, but security advice informs me that India – a country I love so well, and where I am welcome in places forbidden to foreigners – is too dangerous a place for me to travel. I would still come, but have children in my charge, who would miss me if I went missing. Perhaps I shall visit you in disguise.

Bhagavad Gita and Facing Villains. Will Sathya Sai Alumni Speak Up? And Fight!?

Especially to my former students at the Sathya Sai College, Whitefield, via Bangalore, South India, I would commend as worthy of some contemplation a few thoughts. In essence, they accord wth what we read in Chapter 2 of the Bhagavad Gita:

“Yield not to unmanliness, O son of Partha! Ill doth it become thee; cast off this mean faint heartedness and arise, O scorcher of thine enemies”.Among primary witnesses  to the sexual and many other abuses of Sathya Sai Baba and many others around him, we have members from within India and other parts of the world who show determination to testify when the time is advantageous. They are pledged. They come from the very ranks of Sai Baba’s education system. Having suffered misery over the years, they now begin to summon up their strength and to see that dread dark secrets do two things:  they erode one’s chances of healthy selfhood, and they allow villainy to thrive. Those who will not supported them maintain the great betrayal set in motion by Sathya Sai Baba himself.

Some are ready to speak forth. Most keep their heads down.

Ex- Sathya Sai Baba Students Could Aid Sex Abuse Change In India. But Will They?

Many parents trusted Sai Baba and his teachers to deliver an education meant vastly to be different. To be something transformative in terms of character, with unselfishness at its core. And anything but materialistic and utilitarian. Or subject to corruption and scandal. Or for its founder to be exposed on BBC television in a documentary that has been seen by tens or scores or millions of people, and named ‘the Secret Swami’ …..

And – via the hardworking efforts of networked former devotees from around the world, who presented excellent credentials – our movement of exposure was able to be covered at various times by many leading media. This ability to prove our good standing, was, be it said, most contrary to the libels of Dr G. Venkataraman – see:  Robert Priddy and Barry Pittard On Dr G. Venkataraman – Sathya Sai Baba Global Propagandist. And indeed, with a vitriol and cruelty hard to match, of Sai Baba’s virtual proxy on the web,  Gerald Moreno, a web fanatic urged on by those close to Sai Baba who daily broke his teachings in his years of almost daily web-stalking, bitter name-calling attacks on former devotees and others who stood forth. 

For some indication of former devotee activity in exposing Sathya Sai Baba internationally, see:  BBC, CBC (Canada), DR (Denmark), Salon.com (USA), SBS (all television), ABC (Radio Australia). In paper media – India Today, Times of London, Daily Telegraph, Guardian (UK), Marie Claire Magazine, Salon.com, BT, Bild, Focus, Trouw, Speegelbield, Noordhollands Dagblad, Sokaren, Gatopardo, Ottawa Citizen, Toronto Star, Vancouver Sun, Age, Australian Financial Review, West Australian (a major front page article by an award-winning journalist (Torrance Mendez) was pulled at the 11th hour!), Adelaide Advertiser, etc., …..

Public Petition For Official Investigations of Sathya Sai Baba and His Worldwide Organization

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Nancy Wake, WW2 Australian Heroine – A Timeless Role Model

In my own country, Australia, but in other countries too, there is mourning for one of the most magnificent and most highly-decorated war heroines that any country has produced – Nancy Wake. An Australian in the French Resistance, a courier, spy, and fighter against Nazi Germany, she fought behind the lines in France.

Nancy Wake, Great Australian Heroine of The French Resistance, World War II.

The Gestapo code-named her ‘the White Mouse’, referring to her extreme elusiveness in the field. Before the outbreak of war, she saw Jews bound to massive wheels in Vienna, on which they were whipped. She vowed that she would do something to expose such vicious inhumanity.

To those whom I have been addressing in my last blogs, for example the Sathya Sai college boys (now long adult), I commend that they read even the briefest of the abundant news articles in the world news since last Sunday, when she died aged 98. Perhaps they might be challenged to consider that it is by honest, decisive, strong action, rather than by cover up behind flowery words and sweet smiles, that society can be changed for the better.

Since I was sixteen, I loved reading of India’s great freedom fighters, and a delight of my life would be to find that my former students among the many boys I taught at the Sri Sathya Sai College in Whitefield (Kadugodi or Belatur to be more precise), via Bangalore, South India, had, at last, turned out even the slightest bit like these heroic figures. Frankly – apart from some exceptions – I have my grave doubts.

From where I stand, I see that, after all these years of their glacial silence about the sexual and other crimes that they know have been perpetrated against either themselves or others who were around them, they have not honoured the words that they were so fond uttering – such as the telling of the truth, fearlessly. Or conjoining word and deed in right conduct. Or showing compassion for those who suffer. Or suporting those who have raised, and continue to raise, their voices.

True enough, different people come out of trauma at different rates of recovery. But I think that this fact, although true, can also be made one of the worst excuses for inaction, which allows perpetuation of the injustices.

I would like to see those ‘old boys’ get a bit of a wriggle on, and realize that they are immature boys no longer, but grown men who need, by now, to have developed a sense of social and moral responsibility. I would like to see them come good and make a courageous attempt to redress some of the great wrong that they were so profoundly enmeshed in.

Such an example of the ‘right action’ that Sai Baba so often preached about, but did not practise, would justify my old and great hope in my teaching period at the college (1978-79) that these fellows would one day become men of spirit, strength and integrity.

Some of their peers are responding to the sort of conscience call that Robert Priddy and I have put out (and, from the very beginning of the Sai cult exposure, Glen Meloy and Hari Sampath and other former devotees from various professions, trades and cultural backgrounds).

This is to say – for these ex-students to be plucky enough to make a clean breast concerning the gross and evil culture of sexual abuse, the hiding, the secrecy, the bullying, the bribery, and the bad faith that have existed in the deeply corrupted Sathya Sai system of education. Many of these former students know that things were not right. They are still not right. They know that both the Indian and international leadership of the Sathya Sai Organization have profoundly covered up the many scandals. Even though Sai Baba is dead, his co-abusers are still very much alive, many of them in positions of great power. Some of them were intimate participants in the ammoral sty that Sathya Sai Baba built and operated, aided by certain of his teachers and others, in the spurious name of some sort of divine experience.

One may hope that intelligence, if not conscience, comes to the fore before subpoenas start having to be slapped. We are on the way. (See my recent blogs).

They know perfectly well that many boys (among them the so-called ‘form boys’, or homosexual pets) were often and repeatedly sexually abused. And that there were other cruel and unusual practices. Boys who were well-informed knew of various cover ups. Some knew of the faking of materializations, and of the way in which Sai Baba and his servitors would set up wealthy individuals from various countries so as, stealthily, to extract large donations and favours of various kinds. They knew that boys, and now and then a teacher, had been cruelly cast aside like rag dolls when their use as sexual playthings was over. Some know, more recently of Sathya Sai Baba’s fits of sobbing. They knew of towering fits of rage – which boys and well-informed parents and others in more inner circles round Sai Baba passed off as, for example, “Swami in his Shiva aspect”, etc., etc. Some knew that terribly concerned parents from various countries withdrew their boys from the college.

In my mind’s eye and ear, I still see and hear those boys whom Sathya Sai Baba hand-picked to give talks endlessly, like he himself, extolling fearlessness in speaking the truth. However, from where I stand, there are plenty of those with their heads still – after all these years – ducking for cover. Still enjoying the wealth and status that having been at a prestigious Sathya Sai Baba education institute has conferred (often not by merit alone but by influence). Still failing to acknowledge that sexual abuse has devastating and long-lasting effects. Still selfishly thinking of their own skin, and not of their many peers who were stricken. Still in psychological denial of their own warped sexuality. Or of their witnessing the effects of this in their peers.

….. Still refusing to act from the knowledge that IF they would cooperate in tearing down the iron curtains of cover up in regard to sexual abuse they would be doing a huge service to society …….

As I mentioned, I used to rejoice in reading of the exploits of India’s great freedom fighters. All who seek for gutsy role models might consider contemplating of just a few of the many:  Rani Lakshmi Bai, Sarojini Naidu, Sucheta Kripalani, Mahatma Gandhi, Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari, Sardar Vallabhai Patel, Subhas Chandra Bose ……

Anyway, many of my ‘old boys’ used to listen to my recommendations for good reading. I now suggest they read for fifteen minutes or preferably longer about Nancy Wake. It strikes me that they may be more ready, after all their years of frigid inaction, and witnessing the vast pomp and disgusting glitter and falsity of Puttaparthi, to decide that it is time to do something strong and decent which will challenge India and the world to face and address the great pestilence of sexual abuse.

If anyone knows the hypocrisy and spiritual betrayal it involves, they would have to be in a prime position to acknowledge, share and begin to heal their experiences. For any such contingency, outstanding, properly chartered sexual abuse authorities in various countries stand ready to be of assistance, and former leader of the Norwegian Sathya Sai Organization, Robert Priddy (rero@getmail.no) I (barpittard@gmail.com) can confidentially inform of these resources.

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Nancy Wake, ‘The White Mouse’. By Barry Pittard

It is always those like Nancy Wake

Who take the lead to save the day

From the bullies and the thieves who march to take

Peace from the world all away

It is always those, the bold, the awake

Dare halt the robotic dumb cannonade

True grit a pearl makes in the Nancy Wakes

You might think they come Heaven-made

Proud Nancy saw Nazi scapegoats paraded

Like in some cattle-show whipped and degraded

As the giant, loud torture wheel rotated

She swore to fight such hatred

When sore whipping-wheels with people bound

Stops for a while, you might think Peace is found

But there’s always some runts, some dummkopf hounds

To snarl and shove people around

The Gestapo priced Nancy at five million francs

Against her few paltry pounds to silence their tanks

But a White Mouse only costs a free people’s thanks

Against the toxic prattlings of cranks

Some lands gave Nancy their highest awards

But the Canberra runts had hearts made of board

And proud Nancy, she of the flaming sword

Explained where to “shove their award”

She told them: “Be thankful it’s not a pineapple”!

And: “To stick their medals where the monkey stuck its nuts”!

Proud Nancy was proud of her love of life

And death was not death when she conquered dark fright

Though a vintage heart sinks or else a bullet or a knife

The White Mouse still lives in starlight

To proud Nancy, Adieu! But not Adieu to her pride

Of white mice that are still behind the lines

Always, there’ll be bullies and thieves to be defied

And wheels to be halted, and swines

…. The White Mouse has gone behind the lines

Scurrying into starlight

With high heart singing:

“Freedom is the only thing worth living for”

Barry Pittard, Australia

(Copyright protected, Australasian Performing Rights Association, APRA)

Public Petition For Official Investigations of Sathya Sai Baba and His Worldwide Organization

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Sexual Abusers Must Be Convicted And A Public Educated (the Sai Baba Saga)

This article continues from: Sathya Sai Alumni Need To Speak Out. Hiding Maintains A Culture Of Dirt. Posted by Barry Pittard on August 8, 2011

and:  The Upside Down Chair In A Sathya Sai Baba College. Posted by Barry Pittard on August 8, 2011

and:  Bhagavad Gita and Facing Villains. Will Sathya Sai Alumni Speak Up? And Fight!? Posted by Barry Pittard on August 7, 2011

and: Ex- Sathya Sai Baba Students Could Aid Sex Abuse Change In India. But Will They? Posted by Barry Pittard on August 5, 2011

When they are protected by our fear-born silence, perpetrators become ever the more emboldened. They see that communities are passive and vulnerable. That people speak in frightened whispers. Or mutter the old, truths – but uselessly – to comfort themselves. They resemble the flapping of bird-wings clipped well back.

The predators triumph as they stride past all the buried heads and muffled voices. The fiends pounce on one victim after another. Again and again.

Owing to the determined efforts of a family who had three boys in Sathya Sai Baba’s education establishment (two of them sexually abused), a so-called teacher has been sentenced to three years jail. He is cooling his heels that kicked at Heaven. And kicked at the innocence of those whose parents entrusted the tender lives of their children to him.

Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning - Or Dante's Inferno

Parents should also stand right side up, head in the heavens and feet on the ground, and signal to the world that all of us need to work cooperatively in driving away the myriads of rockspiders who prey upon our children. See:

Beth Rude. Ballad of a Child Protectrice. By Barry Pittard

‘Little Fly’. A Ballad of ‘Rock Spiders’ and Sexual Abuse of the Young

Sathya Sai Baba – The Man Who Would Be ‘King of Kings’

But the close associate of (the late) Sathya Sai Baba, is, like his master and corrupter, a betrayer of teachers, and is now under sentence of three years in jail. He is only one whom we have in mind. We will not stop. He is a part of a whole culture of homosexual abuse that Sai Baba spawned.

Too often, those of confused spirituality tell us that we must all smile and speak sweetly. What is the meaning of Rudra Shiva? It means that every now and then smiles have to stop, and that villains are hunted out and made accountable.

Healing and reconciliation cannot happen until men and women of conscience own their responsibility, head in the heavens, feet firmly placed on the ground.

Reconciliation is all about taking an unhappy set of circumstances, and making a ‘clean breast’ of matters. To my old students of the Sathya Sai College at Whitefield, via Bangalore, South India, I say (remembering the love so many of you held for the great holy rivers of India) that this does not simply mean dipping in the Yamuna, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Godavari, Narmada, Kaveri and so on. You may splash all you like, but it does not mean that you can so blithely throw off your feet-on-the ground citizenship, in which all citizens need to be earthed and interconnected, if civil society is going to work for the common good, and if heaven, here or beyond here, is worth reaching for.

Nothing succeeds like success. Nothing succeeds like failure, either, if you are not strong. Will you be strong these days? You may be surprised how our ranks are re-forming. You may yet get your chance to make some light-filled and enduring contributions to civil society. Robert Priddy and I are simply faces to be seen. (It is more effective this way, for the while – NOT YET to put any Indian face to these developments). Enough to say, there are many other former devotees across many trades and professions and areas of study who wish to see good come out of the evil that has been done.

In short, you now have a chance to assist former Sai devotee parents, ex-students and various well-wishers, who are determined to shake off what is bad in the Sathya Sai legacy, and to assert what is positive and good in all times and places.

Further Reading

Bhagavad Gita (which is about guts. Again and again about facing up to the villains)

Public Petition For Official Investigations of Sathya Sai Baba and His Worldwide Organization

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Sathya Sai Alumni Need To Speak Out. Hiding Maintains A Culture Of Dirt

This article continues from:  The Upside Down Chair In A Sathya Sai Baba College. Posted by Barry Pittard on August 8, 2011

and:  Bhagavad Gita and Facing Villains. Will Sathya Sai Alumni Speak Up? And Fight!? Posted by Barry Pittard on August 7, 2011

and: Ex- Sathya Sai Baba Students Could Aid Sex Abuse Change In India. But Will They? Posted by Barry Pittard on August 5, 2011

Is it honorable to wrap oneself in the silent icy shadows of unspoken terrible truths, leaving others to stand forth and to take the brunt? 

When all the details become available, I hope to be able to tell a story of one family’s determination to expose the dirty, abusive cabal that surrounded Sathya Sai Baba, and the catching of one of the most prominent of his teachers. All eloquent when on the stage at Puttaparthi. All neat, pressed and white-clad on the outside, but all dirt on the inside. Prison clothes will befit him. He will have to be kept in another section of the prison. Many prisoners love children, and they do not in the least like what, in Australian prison argot, are referred to as ‘Rockspiders’.

He gave many of you who were part of the Sathya Sai education system a bad time. Some of you lay down in the dirt with him. Some of you perpetrated the same offences on yet others. He, and those like him, took your strength, but only YOU can reclaim it. Mental health professionals well know that such experiences later on terribly erode (though often unconsciously) marital and family life and health.

This so-called educator is an utter disgrace to his noble profession. The whole world of responsible, caring and ethical teachers can only condemn his betrayal of students, their parents, family and friends, and the extended Sai community.

Only the habit of strong actions can build you up and make you strong again. It is a perpetually self-renewing habit. One cannot allow oneself to be made weak by the strength of the weakness of those all around.

When I taught my boys at the Sathya Sai College outside Bangalore (1978-9), I thought that this role was as fortunate a one as could ever bless a teacher.

Sai Baba's Brindavan Campus - A Pretty Face To The World

It seemed to me, then, that in front of me were souls, noble and good, who would shine wherever they went in the world, some to the world of the farm, some to affairs of state, some to healing, others to exploring the stars and oceans, to government, the armed forces, and all the rest. And indeed, some to be teachers – a role, in significant ways, second only to that of parents and immediate family.Trustworthy teachers, I mean ……

The Small Library (Whose heart’s aim was to make boys grow into strong men)

Let me tell those boys – although, I have to remind myself, they are men now – a story. Remember how we had a room to ourselves in the college. We called it ‘The Small Library’. It was rather special, wasn’t it? It was a bustling hub of cultural activity. Moreover, a meeting place for boys who would not normally mix all that much. Boys who were dark or lighter-skinned. Boys posh. Boys rough. Boys who had it comfortable in the residential college, and others who daily, six days a week, came and went in rattling, crowded buses, some from long distances. Boys who hailed from villages and from cities and towns up and down India. Boys from the homes of ex-maharajas and maharani’s and the power elites.

Golden Builders

But the ‘Small Library’ without preachings but more like bees building the golden honey –  welded us into a learningful, toiling force. It was a place for sinking obstructive differences. A place that went far beyond  grubbing for paltry marks and petty privileges.

And years later, I heard that your beloved English lecturer PK (Mohanty), my dear and esteemed colleague,  got cast out. Why? Because, it is my understanding, his was one small voice strong in defence of your innocence. Think back to others, whom you happen to know were not ‘bad eggs’  who got cast out. Think back, too, to the boys whose parents withdrew their boys from college. Think of all the hush-hush that went on about it. This form of thinking back that has triggered off the questioning process in others. Boys whom you held dear were lambs to the slaughter. I can tell you, if you do not already know it – they suffer terribly now. There is a terrible legacy of sexual confusion, relationship difficulty, and great spiritual and moral betrayal.

Because you are alumni of Sathya Sai institutions, the careers of many of you have prospered. It has allowed you to leap over candidates for jobs in many trades and professions. It has conferred  privileges for you and your families vastly denied even to many in India’s privileged classes in India. But then, because of the psychological damage of the great many abuses, many of your brothers from your Sai education days have had their lives wrecked. Might you not think that they need you now? Might it not occur to you that some of them wish to see stopped those perpetrators who still thrive? 

There are moves – in India and internationally – to apply various remedies to these evils. Some of these are:

– Legal. Both in regard to criminal law and civil litigation

– Healing in regard to individuals and families affected by various forms of abuse by Sathya Sai Baba and his accomplices and supporters

– Addressing abuse of the young via the work of public education and reform in India and other countries .

Well may PK’s voice still have trembled. But feeling weak does not mean that you are not strong. The good soldier is scared to the gut, but pitches into battle. It is all a matter of working with what strength you have available to you, and landing the blow, or doing the tender deed, in the best place you can manage at the time.

Bullies need to be felled. And you need to strike down their ability to offend. Rehabilitating them is often out of the question. The habit of strength grows from less to greater, and weakness becomes a stranger. Some of you who see PK may like to tell him that I am speaking to you.

There, in that ‘Small Library’ with its big strong heartbeat, which I have always since heard in my heart, was a sacred place. Have they pulled it down?

In ‘The Small Library’, in imaginative and vivid ways, you were able to crawl out from under the dreadful and stilted rote ‘learning’ endemic in so much ‘education’ in India and many another place. You affirmed, in pragmatic ways,  Sathya Sai Baba’s insistence that the only ‘caste’ is the ‘caste’ of Humanity. We worked strongly as a team.  But of what profit if you should apply teamship only to doing so well in cricket if you cannot be strong in the far greater ‘game’ of a life well-lived? (Mind you, if I may dilate – India will do well at cricket at least until our new players in the Australian Test 11 have had their baptism in fire in the next three or so years).

Remember how we organized for boys with advanced English skills to communicate our tasks across a number of Indian state mother tongues? Think of any one initiative of ours – and how one kind of strength would contribute to the building of other types of strength! Think of how we got out of our heads and into our hands and, for example, bound books with rapidly establishing skill – and how, the respect of the intellectuals burgeoned when the boys who came from artisan backgrounds were able to shine. And how boys who were not bookish or particularly philosophical began to see how ideological concepts can interact with practical ones.

What did it matter to us that the old system – not terribly much reformed since the Englishman Lord Macaulay had his way with ‘education’, so-called, in India – got a bit of a shaking, and boys streamed through the ‘Small Library’, and sat up and down corridors, around what we created!  This spectacle shocked some of the frigid, chin-stroking ‘elders’? It was only later that I heard that some of more hide-bound lecturers wanted us shut down. And what would a foreigner know about teaching young Indians? How could I fail? – you guys taught me ….! 

Thank goodness we had some who stood forth for us. Will you not stand forth now?

Eventually, your famous Indian scientist Dr Bhagavantham sent a lovely letter of appreciation. Some of you may know that in later years he spoke up to Sai Baba. (I am told, but cannot prove, that a member of his family was abused). A well-known and respected Indian industrial leader who was permitted to pass in and out of Sai Baba’s compound, told me that Sai Baba, just outside the door of the Kadugodi residence, went into a terrible fit of yelling at Bhagavantham. The latter was cast out. One of a long line of abrupt, often unexplained disappearances, as many of you will know. How absurd that we ever thought that Sai Baba simply showed, from time to time, his “Rudra Siva aspect”.  He was a bully. Let’s call things by their right name. Are you still scared? Then stop it. You will despise yourself, when the children all around you need to see a man of alight with strength and decency.

But you see, unless you stand forth strongly yourself, you never get to identify those others who are strong, and with whom you can make common cause. Stand with them and you will end up with friends the like of which will make you wish to be in no other company.

Trust was established, obstacles fell.  We blazed pathways to cooperative learning. We put the ‘busy’ into business. I had a good time. Did you?

This article continues at:

Sexual Abusers Must Be Convicted And A Public Educated (the Sai Baba Saga)

Posted by Barry Pittard on August 8, 2011

Public Petition For Official Investigations of Sathya Sai Baba and His Worldwide Organization

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The Upside Down Chair In A Sathya Sai Baba College

This article continues from:  Bhagavad Gita and Facing Villains. Will Sathya Sai Alumni Speak Up? And Fight!? Posted by Barry Pittard on August 7, 2011

and:  Ex- Sathya Sai Baba Students Could Aid Sex Abuse Change In India. But Will They? Posted by Barry Pittard on August 5, 2011

A few times, in moments of fun, when I taught at the Sathya Sai College, Whitefield, via Bangalore, South India, I turned a chair upside down, leaving it uncomfortably propped against the window wall of ‘The Small Library’, which we magically created, that looked on the fields where the strong farmers faced every weather. A traffic of boys on the lookout to do a good deed would turn the chair right side up. When they had departed I inverted it again. And again. Now and then I asked: 

“Why is it that chair reminds me of the state of the world”?

But only one boy …. I said only one ….. probed deeper. He was not from the residential college, ostensibly full of the future leaders of India. Nothing so choice. He was a ‘day boy’ who lived down at the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited colony. Only that one boy ever asked: why IS the chair upside down? I told him that it is to remind me that the world is upside down, and that what is useful and good has been turned upside down, legs kicking in search of Heaven but the head stuck in the ground.

Fifteen years later, in 1998, to pay homage to a very poor family (the Hari Singh family, who ran the idly shop, which was really a ‘temple’ of love) – beautifully honest, loving and true – I traveled from Puttaparthi to Kadugodi village, near to the college. A man passing by excitedly came up, saying, “Surely, you are Mr Pittard”. It was that one boy. Now a man. He relayed to me the story of the upside down chair!  He took me to his home, where his wife nursed their little baby, full of the innocence that always holds a ridiculous promise for fair weather in life.

Well, boys, or men – if that is what you are! – I trust that all your children are safe and well, and stricken by no predator. Would that I could visit, but security advice informs me that India – a country I love so well, and where I am welcome in places forbidden to foreigners – is too dangerous a place for me to travel. I would still come, but have children in my charge, who would miss me if I went missing. Perhaps I shall visit you in disguise.

It may be that you may wish to keep kicking at Heaven, your head stuck in the ground. Or perhaps I shall be able to sit here, right side up, one old man, and joyfully see that there is more than one boy ….. I said more than one ….. who will remember what, alone, is worth remembering about chairs and their strange ways.

Public Petition For Official Investigations of Sathya Sai Baba and His Worldwide Organization

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Bhagavad Gita and Facing Villains. Will Sathya Sai Alumni Speak Up? And Fight!?

This article continues from:  Ex- Sathya Sai Baba Students Could Aid Sex Abuse Change In India. But Will They? Posted by Barry Pittard on August 5, 2011

Especially to my former students at the Sathya Sai College, Whitefield, via Bangalore, South India, I would commend as worthy of some contemplation a few thoughts. In essence, they accord wth what we read in Chapter 2 of the Bhagavad Gita:

“Yield not to unmanliness, O son of Partha! Ill doth it become thee; cast off this mean faint heartedness and arise, O scorcher of thine enemies”.

A number of survivors of Sathya Sai Baba immoral depredations have shown much courage in the face of utmost distortion and vilification. They wish that, if at all possible, others do not suffer the same sexual abuse at the hands of Sathya Sai Baba and those around him, or from anyone, anywhere. Indeed, when one looks at other leavetakings from gurus and communions, the same sort of factors are repeatedly encountered. Those who speak out are attacked and ridiculed. To the shock of the initial abuse is added the rejection of those whom apostates counted as dear, loving and respectful. To this burden is added, yet again, the lack of true support by those who were also abused. A public that is educated about these reactions, and its own responsibilities is the only chance via which we can envisage a better day.

Though He Is Dead, Sathya Sai Baba’s Accomplices and Enablers Thrive

By no means is Sathya Sai Baba’s death the end of the great betrayal. His co-abusers still thrive.They fight for the tinsel and the trash, and the shattered pieces of his religious empire. In some of them gold glitters in their eyes. But true goodness requires exactly what Sai Baba so often said – speaking truth, and acting in accordance with the words. And speaking and acting it fearlessly.

Sathya Sai College, Whitefield. Founder Sai Baba Died April 2011

Among primary witnesses  to the sexual and many other abuses of Sathya Sai Baba and many others around him, we have members from within India and other parts of the world who show determination to testify when the time is advantageous. They are pledged. They come from the very ranks of Sai Baba’s education system. Having suffered misery over the years, they now begin to summon up their strength and to see that dread dark secrets do two things:  they erode one’s chances of healthy selfhood, and they allow villainy to thrive. Those who will not supported them maintain the great betrayal set in motion by Sathya Sai Baba himself.

Some are ready to speak forth. Most keep their heads down.

Continued at:

The Upside Down Chair In A Sathya Sai Baba College

Posted by Barry Pittard on August 8, 2011

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Public Petition For Official Investigations of Sathya Sai Baba and His Worldwide Organization

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Ex- Sathya Sai Baba Students Could Aid Sex Abuse Change In India. But Will They?

A few years ago, I addressed an ‘open letter’ to my former Whitefield (‘Brindavan’, via Bangalore, South India) Sathya Sai College Students.

On re-reading, I see that its terms can fairly be addressed (give or take the occasional specific reference) to all alumni, past and present. There have been so many revelations of great and pervasive corruption both in Sathya Sai Baba himself and in many of his officials (especially his core servitors) that it may not go amiss to post this communication here.

Thousands of Sathya Sai education alumni face a dilemma not only in their immediate communities but wherever they may settle or travel. It is hard to imagine a major education institution in which a founder and certain teachers and Trust officials have been so deeply embroiled in scandal.

But, with searching analysis and deeply thought-through remedial action, what can be so terrible can, with great good will, be transformed into something that is so wonderful. And these alumni, potentially, are faced with a great challenge. Examples where still more horrible consequences could have ensued spring to mind. Such as the work associated with names like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and so on. I do not mean to say that their visions for society should not be challenged. I do mean to say that they triumphed over likely outcomes that are almost too terrible to contemplate. 

Was major change to human mores and consciousness ever achieved without courage and sacrifice? Or via silence and inaction?

The Sathya Sai Baba schools, colleges and university were always places which emphasized moral uprightness. In all Sai Baba’s and his teachers’ preachments, compassion for those who suffer was exalted as an action, not just a fine feeling. Such action was the means by which the great primal energy which flows through all sentient beings could be vividly experienced.

The qualities forever enunciated were:  Sathya (Truth), Dharma (Right Conduct), Shanti (Peace), Prema (Love) and Non-violence (Ahimsa). These were said to be timeless in their nature but pragmatic and contemporary if they were to be experienced at all.

Many parents trusted Sai Baba and his teachers to deliver an education meant vastly to be different. To be something transformative in terms of character, with unselfishness at its core. And anything but materialistic and utilitarian. Or subject to corruption and scandal. Or for its founder to be exposed on BBC television in a documentary that has been seen by tens or scores or millions of people, and named ‘the Secret Swami’ …..

And – via the hardworking efforts of networked former devotees from around the world, who presented excellent credentials – our movement of exposure was able to be covered at various times by many leading media. This ability to prove our good standing, was, be it said, most contrary to the libels of Dr G. Venkataraman – see:  Robert Priddy and Barry Pittard On Dr G. Venkataraman – Sathya Sai Baba Global Propagandist. And indeed, with a vitriol and cruelty hard to match, of Sai Baba’s virtual proxy on the web,  Gerald Moreno, a web fanatic urged on by those close to Sai Baba who daily broke his teachings in his years of almost daily web-stalking, bitter name-calling attacks on former devotees and others who stood forth. 

For some indication of former devotee activity in exposing Sathya Sai Baba internationally, see:  BBC, CBC (Canada), DR (Denmark), Salon.com (USA), SBS (all television), ABC (Radio Australia). In paper media – India Today, Times of London, Daily Telegraph, Guardian (UK), Marie Claire Magazine, Salon.com, BT, Bild, Focus, Trouw, Speegelbield, Noordhollands Dagblad, Sokaren, Gatopardo, Ottawa Citizen, Toronto Star, Vancouver Sun, Age, Australian Financial Review, West Australian (a major front page article by an award-winning journalist (Torrance Mendez) was pulled at the 11th hour!), Adelaide Advertiser, etc., …..

Of course, perhaps there never was an education institution which lived up to its glowing Prospectus. But at the very pinnacle of the Sai institutions was a leader who, for whatever good he intended or achieved, was bright in what he preached but often dark in what he secretly lived.

For those who wish confidentially to write to me:  barpittard@gmail.com

Or – Robert Priddy, former head of the Norwegian Sathya Sai Organization, retired academic, University of Oslo: rero@getmail.no

Note:  For those who wish to contemplate mounting Class Action Legal Suits, networked former Sai devotees remain servants, just as we do for those who do not wish to take such actions. Those who may wish to embark on the healing of themselves and families, we are happy to put in contact  with our highly qualified psychologists and psychotherapists under conditions of the strictest confidentiality. Advice can also be accessed via departments in major universities, chartered national and international associations, etc.

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Sathya Sai College, Whitefield. Founder Sai Baba Dead, April 2011

To My Dear Former Whitefield College Students

I taught you English for two years in 1978-79. These were wonderful experiences.

More recently, Sathya Sai Baba, founder of Whitefield College outside Bangalore, south India, is being accused of large-scale sexual abuse of boys and young men of many countries.

Whether through my own naiveté or lack of experience as a teacher, I was ignorant of any immoral sexual harassment perpetrated upon you or your classmates by Sathya Sai Baba. I am sad that I did not know of any actual or potential abuses, and only strong, sustained action to stop any further abuses by him will alleviate this sadness. The evidence very strongly indicates that he continues these abuses. .

As I reflect on those years I spent with you at the Whitefield College, I wonder:

Did you then yourself feel that whole families, even communities, would have disbelieved and scorned you had you spoken out?

Were you concerned that your education, career and marriage prospects would fail if you spoke out?

Was it impossible for you to reconcile your beliefs with your knowledge or suspicion that the one you believed to be “God” was a sexual abuser? Did some of you think that God would manifest in the guise of a molester of children and young men?

Did you secretly despise what was, it seems, happening to your beautiful, tender, and trusting innocence – yet did not know how to stop it?

Several of us, as former, long-time devotees, are now global coordinators in response to the alleged abuses. Increasing numbers of Indian and overseas persons have shared with us what they swear to be their direct experiences of sexual abuses by Sathya Sai Baba. They tell us that they found the experience most abhorrent, confusing and even traumatic.

Many of the descriptions, in shocking graphic detail, are heartrending to hear in person or on the phone, and to read in their affidavits and other testimonies. Expert psychologists and police have shown us how experienced sexual abusers operate the world over. The same patterns occur in countless worldwide reports that allege sexual misconduct by Sathya Sai Baba.

I was not able to stand up on behalf of what seems to have been your horribly betrayed innocence back in those days. However, I will – both openly and privately – do my best to represent that innocence now, and on an international scale.

I trust we will assist each other to uphold Truth, Right Conduct, Peace and Love. (These are such easy words to say! Yet, work and courage are required to uphold them). We coordinators are quiet about issues such as numbers and whereabouts of alleged victims or witnesses. On websites and elsewhere, defenders of Sathya Sai Baba and his assistants deride us for not producing credible witnesses. Time will most decidedly tell!

The real reason for our silence is the protection of those persons (or their families) by whom the allegations are being made. Outstanding professional abuse counsellors, Interpol, foreign ministries, legal and other consultants are closely assisting our efforts. With ever-increasing strength, former devotees from many countries will present to the world, and the law courts, extremely powerful evidence of terrible abuse of spiritual power. Abuse by one who seemed to be of the calibre of a Sri Krishna or Sri Rama or Jesus or Buddha. Yet, none of these illustrious spiritual leaders were ever suspected or accused of any such dreadful crimes against minors and young men.

Beloved former students, some of you and I actually were present during ineffably beautiful miraculous experiences that the rational mind will never comprehend. That is on the side of Light. It has promoted transformation. However, we are only whole persons when, fearlessly, we can look unflinchingly into the Darkness as well. This brings the greater transformation.

I welcome you, on a strictly private basis, to please contact me. Any information that you can provide concerning sexual or any other abuses by Sathya Sai Baba will be appreciated. It is our duty as citizens to ensure that sexual abuse and other crimes are made accountable. No matter what abilities a rare, super phenomenal, charismatic individual may possess, let us be sure: God will never manifest as a vast scale, serial sexual abuser of boys and young men.

Barry Pittard (Australia)

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Next article in this series:

Posted by Barry Pittard on August 5, 2011

Further Reading

Re Sathya Sai Baba sex abuse accomplices and cover-up persons – important announcement

Posted by robertpriddy on July 16, 2011

Robert Priddy and Barry Pittard On Dr G. Venkataraman – Sathya Sai Baba Global Propagandist

Posted by Barry Pittard on October 18, 2009

THE SATHYA SAI ORGANISATION’S DECEPTION AND PROPAGANDA EXPOSED – By Robert Priddy and Barry Pittard.   Part One

Two Three Four

Public Petition For Official Investigations of Sathya Sai Baba and His Worldwide Organization

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Clarity – The Treasure Sathya Sai Baba Denied His Devotees

There is nothing quite like clarity.

Here is an excellent English-language Indian television report. It is good to see ordinary people who live and work in Puttaparthy being mined for their views. They have large concerns about the veracity of Sathya Sai Central Trust officials. My reader might like to look at the far more convincing body language at the interviewees in the streets of Puttaparthi, than of Sathya Sai Central Trust officials:

Sai Baba Trust money: Puttaparthi wants clarity

(For this NDTV report, click on title above or on photo below)

Puttaparthi citizens have grave trust issues about Sai Central Trust

In the archives of various movements of dissent against authoritarian cults, there is, perhaps, nothing that so frequently recurs and obscures clarity like bad old-fashioned blindness to the testimony of those who have raised their voices. Dissenters almost get used to the strong tendency to fallacious argument, or else the refusal to study any writing which remotely questions the adherents’ rigid belief system.

Until citizens suffer – very often from the involvement of their children or close friends in cults – they themselves have another sort of blindness. It is a perilous naiveté. Clearly, the time to address a threat to civil society is at that stage one may call ‘the Weimar Republic Stage’. Otherwise, in worst case scenarios a Hitler arises and holds sway. Even a little blindness can make people stumble.

Sathya Sai Baba devotees may try all they like to avert their devotion-steeped gaze from all the scandal revelations of the last weeks. First, Sai Baba died in a year very different to his widely known prediction of AD 2022. Then came official Sathya Sai websites carrying Procrustean, mangled and fallacious attempts to confuse issues about Lunar and Solar calendar dates. The ‘reasoning’ was so flawed that an alert high school student in clear-thinking exercises could rebut the poor logic, and spot how Sai Baba officials conveniently depart from the usual calendar reckonings in Sai literature.

Soon, the world was treated to reports about the opening of Sai Baba’s rooms, from which he had, it is said, barred all but his paramour, Satyajit, his favoured successor. Lo, dazzling riches enough to make old King Midas or Croesus don their darkest sunglasses.

The next days brought repeated finds of vast hidden treasures. The state police and government were involved, and we saw clear public proof of false and contradictory statements by Sai Central Trust officials. This was exposed in newspapers and television for millions in India to see. There were vast millions in various currencies. Heavy loadings of gold, silver, precious gems. Out-of-date choice foods, and luxury goods mouldered away. 

In regard to putrescence, I was reminded of the decaying mansion of Miss Haversham in Charles Dickens’ novel, “Great Expectations”. See: When Perfumes Reek: Lavish Scents, Shampoos etc., Among Sai Baba Secret Treasure Hoard

     

     

Sai Baba’s vast, secret treasure and rotting luxury food items hid behind external opulence

So much for Sathya Sai Baba’s and his officials historic claims that he never accumulated wealth and, moreover that “every naya paisa” is accounted for.

“For my sake (believe it or not) do not spend a naya paisa. Though 56 years have passed, I have not got even one shirt or gown stitched for Me. I am now wearing what is given by a student…” (Sathya Sai Speaks Volume XV. page 312.)

“Right from a tender age, I never received anything from others. I only give and give and give, I never receive.”
(Sanathana Sarathi October 1998, page 275)

Soon after the Yajur Mandir haul, large amounts of currency were transported, under great secrecy, with the full knowledge of the ashram’s head of security, Pradhan, from Puttaparthi in a van and a passenger bus. This lead to police arrests of the couriers – (See newpaper report below) “Harish Nandasetty, who was caught carrying Rs 35.5 lakh in a Toyota Qualis at Kodikonda checkpost on Saturday night, before Hindpur Judicial First Class Magistrate Kamalakar Naidu. He was remanded in judicial custody till June 27 and the seized cash was handed over to the court. The other two – Chandrasekhar and Sohan Setty – were also produced before the magistrate and were remanded in judicial custody”.  Questioned for many hours were the Trust’s V. Srinivasan and R.J. Ratnakar (Sathya Sai Baba’s nephew). Has my reader noticed how it is the lower ranks who mostly get copped, and not the Mr Bigs?

Darkness still surrounds the issue about the money found on the bus, its original ownership and eventual destination or how such money can be moved about without accountability to any government authority, such as Inland Revenue. Or indeed any typical arrangement like an armoured security vehicle, with trained and armed security personnel. Or why such huge amounts were in cash and not in cheque form, as stated hitherto by the Trust. Commandeered Puttaparthi records themselves disproved the Trust’s story about donations by 12 donors.

No matter that the van and bus episodes came right on the heels of the discovery of many millions in currency and the gold, silver, precious gemstones and many other valuables that abounded in hiding places in Sai Baba’s private quarters, Ratnakar constantly harped, amid smiles of reassurance, on the transparency issue, when all the evidence argued an appalling lack of transparency and the biggest of messes. Ratnakar is the man who has worked to prevent Sai Baba’s favourite, Satyajit, from leadership of the Trust.

Trust public statements are now very few and ever more highly sanitized. A snippet on the heels of over five hours of police questioning Ratnakar got out in only one newspaper, as far as my internet searches could find. Other bulletins said how he gave no interview following his “grilling”. Then came news that Srinivasan gave no statement immediately after his five hours plus of police “grilling”. I search in vain for any since. At the time, I wrote:

“But how does one explain Trust workers clandestinely moving – in a van and in a bus – such vast amounts? In fact, right on the heels of the discovery of multi millions of cash, gemstones and other valuables secreted in walls and ceiling spaces and wherever else in Sai Baba’s bedroom? One may smile at the sheer gall, if not the dark arts of it all. Who are these donors? If the donations were genuine, what sort of security did they get for all their no doubt hard-earned money? An armoured vehicle? Nothing of the sort. Just the two Trust agents, the brothers Shetty,  one in a Qalis van, the other, at a different time, in a passenger bus.

Where, too, has gone any semblance of the Sathya Sai Central Trust’s duty of care for the safety of life and limb of its  workers on a money transportation assignment fraught with danger? This, in an area with trained eyes not only of individual criminals, criminal gangs, and private armies of feudal landlords but of ubiquitous, highly organized, armed political struggle groups such as the Naxalites (with countless splinter groups), the so-called Peoples’ War Group or PWG, etc. Many police and security authorities complain of the emasculation by Andhra Pradesh state politicians of state security and police cadres capable of action, and the pipe dream of thinking that negotiation and accommodation are going to work.

Why the earlier Trust assertions that donations are dealt with by cheque? Why such vast amounts of loose cash? Where is the accountability and transparency in all this?”

Writers on the Sathya Sai saga, like Robert Priddy, Brian Steel and myself have long exposed the tissues of lies that Sai Trust officials spin to devotees at large and to others. But what devotees were prepared to use their critical faculties in the least? Very few indeed. Against all their knowledge down the years that we were not (as Sai Baba said of us) ‘Demons’, ‘Judases’, and that we had paltry money motives, they mindlessly preferred to listen to the deceitful avowals of leaders such as Indulal Shah, Dr Michael  Goldstein – see: Sathya Sai Baba Chief, Dr Goldstein, Explodes. “I am the consummate professional” (See Film Clips), Dr G. Venkataraman, and so on – see:Robert Priddy and Barry Pittard On Dr G. Venkataraman – Sathya Sai Baba Global Propagandist

                 From the Telegraph, Calcutta article “Open Sesame! Baba and his chamber of secrets”

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Puttaparthi: Prashanti Nilayam CSO arrested

Tuesday 21 June 2011

Police today  arrested Chief Security Officer (CSO) of Prashanti Nilayam, as part of their ongoing probe into the cash flow from Puttaparthi to Bangalore.

 According to sources, during investigation, it was found that Pradhan, a retired Air Force official, brought Rs 35.5 lakh out of Yajurveda Mandir, Sai Baba’s personal chamber, and handed it over to Sathya Sai Central Trust members RJ Ratnakar and V Srinivasan at the Shanti Bhavan. The cash was in turn given to Chandrasekhar, driver of Srinivasan, and later, was passed on to Sohan Setty and Harish Nanda.

The trio was caught by the police on Saturday night while transporting the cash to Bangalore. Police are likely to serve notices on Ratnakar and Srinivasan in a day or two, the sources said.

Meanwhile, Prashanti Nilayam was stunned into silence following the cash seizures in the last two days and disclosure by the police that the flight of capital from Puttaparthi to Bangalore was traced to some of the Sathya Sai Trust members.

Penugonda DSP Kolar Krishna, investigating officer of the case, produced Harish Nandasetty, who was caught carrying Rs 35.5 lakh in a Toyota Qualis at Kodikonda checkpost on Saturday night, before Hindpur Judicial First Class Magistrate Kamalakar Naidu. He was remanded in judicial custody till June 27 and the seized cash was handed over to the court.

The other two – Chandrasekhar and Sohan Setty – were also produced before the magistrate and were remanded in judicial custody.

On Sunday, Sathya Sai Trust member and Sai Baba’s nephew RJ Ratnakar had contradicted the police and claimed the trust had nothing to do with the cash. He had also claimed that 12 devotees of Baba, linked to the cash seizures, would explain themselves either to the court or the police by Monday. “No one has either approached us or contacted us till now. The cash belongs to the trust,” the Penugonda DSP said.

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Further Reading

Oprah Winfrey Show On Male Sexual Abuse: Sathya Sai Baba Cult Survivors Should Watch

Posted by Barry Pittard on July 21, 2011

Another Sathya Sai Baba Multi Million Haul Found At Puttaparthi

Posted by Barry Pittard on July 20, 2011

Young Male Sex Abuse: Legal ‘Locomotive’ Hurtles Towards Sai Baba’s Accomplices

Posted by Barry Pittard on July 19, 2011

Young Male Sex Abuse: International Legal Challenge Will Confront Key Sathya Sai Baba Men

Posted by Barry Pittard on July 19, 2011

Towards Accountability Of Sathya Sai Baba’s Accomplices: A Call To Legal Action

Posted by Barry Pittard on July 16, 2011

For Those Connected With Sathya Sai Education Institutions: A Reckoning Time

Posted by Barry Pittard on July 16, 2011

Public Petition For Official Investigations of Sathya Sai Baba and His Worldwide Organization

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