'Rumours' that criticize Sathya
Sai Baba - many of which are but plain facts - are the kind that are denounced,
while the wildest rumours making Sathya Sai Baba seem much more than he is, are allowed
to spread unhindered. There are countless baseless rumours, accounts of miracles,
'stories' and the like circulating in the Sai movement. Many of these are supported
and encouraged by Sai Org. office-bearers, and even the worst are tolerated
as an enhancement of Sai Baba's fame without any refutation of them. It is considered
better in most cases to keep quiet rather than draw more attention to the fantastic claims people make about Sathya Sai Baba. A large number
of stories that are constantly repeated have definitively been shown to be inventions,
while many others simply cannot be true because they defy all feasibility. There
is no limit to what is possible in most Sai devotees' minds, for "Swami
is the all-powerful Godhead". The many miracle stories, often embroidered
out of subjective experience, misunderstanding and sheer inventions, are the
daily bread and wine of a mass of devotees... a fact to which I can attest through
my hundreds of conversations with followers from
many countries of the world through two decades.
One of the causes of most rumour mongering
is a regime of secrecy and suppression of fact. The culture of secrecy - and
of misinformation that may not be challenged - combined with total unaccountability
for anything at the ashram, provides the climate in which rumours thrive to
levels even beyond the hearts' most surreal desires. One condition for such
confusion to flourish, that of clamp-down on facts that might prove at all embarrassing,
is certainly fully fulfilled by Sathya Sai Baba and all his various institutions, not forgetting
the authoritarian and increasingly cultish Sai Org.
Blankly refusing any kind of
reasonable scientific investigation under controlled environments of his "materialisations",
Sathya Sai Baba plays all his many marked cards very close to his chest at all times and
backs this up by spreading his own incredible rumours... mainly through private
interviews, some few examples of the very numerous instances of which to be
recorded subsequently. No one can question him freely, let alone buttonhole
or corner him, for his position is now of such social power that he answers
to no one on anything and is surrounded by a horde of fanatical sycophants who
protect him in all ways (with undercover Israeli-trained commandos and automatic
weapons in profusion at the ashram in case of more physical events). These officials
are ever on the watch for dissent, even aim to stop open questioning discussion,
and they remove and ban critical persons from the ashram and exclude them from
the Sathya Sai Organization without their having any chance of redress or even
without offering any explanation.
RUMOR-MONGERING
SO AS TO INCREASE HIS OWN INFLUENCE
Secondly, rumours
can be spread by those wishing to achieve certain ends. This is a very effective
kind of deceit and abuse of people's trust. One of those ends in this case is
certainly to convince the world that he is the avatar with supernatural powers
surpassing even those of any known previous deity. Many stories come direct
from Sai Baba in the interview room, including the so-called 'private' interviews
where he may be alone with one person, with a couple or even a small group.
He never makes any public statement about what leaks out unless they pose such
a major problem that he is eventually forced to make a public denial. This eventually
occurred in the case of the famous '27 predictions of catastrophe' which he
was widely reputed to have told 18 of his students. (Some versions have 38 points,
mostly predictions). After about 15 years of constant circulation of these dire
world disaster warnings, where survival and safety was made to seem something
reserved for Sathya Sai Baba devotees alone, the hysteria among the world-wide Sai movement
(and other impressionable cults too) became so great that something simply HAD
to be done. Confronted with the situation by several top foreign devotees, Sathya Sai Baba
finally had to denounce it all as mere rumour and speculation in a discourse
on Shivaratri in 1991. (To be detailed and discussed in a coming article).
Another unusual case of suppression
of a 'rumour' took place in 1998 when Sathya Sai Baba told people of a coming air traffic
crisis due to earth magnetic forces disturbing navigational equipment and warned
interviewees not to travel by air at that time... a specific period of some
days. Needless to say, the incident Sathya Sai Baba predicted never occurred, as has also
been the case with the large majority of his predictions.
The constant talk - backed by
Sathya Sai Baba's own assertions in numerous interviews - that many of the rings and ear-rings
he gives are 'genuine diamonds', is a prototype of a rumour mill. There is no
documented foundation anywhere by anyone to show that Sathya Sai Baba has EVER given away
a single diamond of any appreciable value. Yet I have got fully documented by
the Queen of Denmark's private jeweller, Mr. Peter Hertz of Copenhagen, that
the green stone in the ring he gave me was a fake - allegedly a diamond and
at 6 carats worth into the millions of dollars, according to hearsay from all
kinds of experts. It is a near-valueless synthetic sapphire with green tinfoil
behind it to make it shine more! Sathya Sai Baba not only lies outright about these stones
(I have heard him do so several times, such as to a Mr. Kaufmann from Denmark
in 1988) and he very willingly lets these untruths spread on a very large scale!
Thus he is the chief rumour monger himself, and has the sheer impertinence to
preach to others that this is akin to evil or demonic behaviour! He NEVER says
his gifts are the valueless trinkets they evidently are, even though their amazing
value is talked about constantly.
The dissemination of rumours
creates many conflicting accounts of one and the same event or fact. This creates
confusion and confusion is one of the major techniques in Sathya Sai Baba's
repertoire. One classic example, he let his younger brother, Janakiram, to persist
in claiming the intruders in 1993 were aiming to assassinate Sathya Sai Baba
(he may have put his brother up to it, but we don't know because Sathya Sai
Baba got away scot-free without facing any questioning). This Janaki Ramiah
claimed to the press several times. He was in effect rewarded by Sathya Sai
Baba with effective control over the entire gigantic funds of the Central Trust,
which he still has, though surely depending on Sathya Sai Baba's obvious veto
powers. Meanwhile, Sathya Sai Baba denied there was any attempt on his life
in the 1993 incident, putting this on record in his Gurupurnima discourse of
that year and refusing to bring charges against any conspirators due to alleged
lack of evidence of any murder plans etc. This creates complete confusion where
it was most needed, after which it was somewhat easier for the Andhra Pradesh
authorities, not acting without higher orders, to quash the continued investigation
of the unfinished case!
THE
RUMOUR MILL AND ITS EDITORS
If the accounts
by those who were able to question contemporaries of the young Sathya Sai
Baba are correct (especially the utterly devoted Prof. N. Kasturi's 'official
biography' of the self-proclaimed avatar as commissioned by Sathya Sai Baba), he behaved
as an incarnate deity even as a young man. However, Kasturi overlooks or minimises
the significance of the numerous instances he himself skirts around showing
how Sathya Sai Baba was subject to most ordinary social and other limitations (being bullied
as a boy, not being accepted by his parents or elder brother as other than
a boy and so on). His young brother told my close friend V.K. Narasimhan that
the parents had terrible difficulties with Sathya Sai Baba as a boy for he was so unruly
and disobeying. Sathya Sai Baba was a frequent truant at school and was what we typically
call a 'drop out'. And this behaviour from one who lays so much weight on
respecting and obeying parental wishes! Kasturi's rosy adulation of him as
'Bala Sai' and a reborn mischievous baby Krishna etc. was developed at second-hand,
long after SB grew up. Kasturi told Prof. E. Haraldsson that, though he is
somehow divine, "Swami is also very human"... seemingly a belated
half-admission that Sathya Sai Baba suffers from faults and sins like any other person...
for surely Kasturi cannot have failed to encountered lies, sexual proclivities, deceptions and dishonourable avoidance of justice?
Prof. Kasturi
also modified his standpoint of complete trust in Sathya Sai Baba when he
told me in his later years that Sathya Sai even claimed that what was recorded
on a tape Kasturi made in his presence was NOT WHAT HE HAD SAID! It was evident
that he had some doubt about this... and he wondered what I made of it. I
must admit that I was somewhat befuddled and had to disregard it as best I
could. Then, but not any longer, though! His response to those who dare to
point out a possible discrepancy in what he says and does is as if to rise up like a cobra if he thinks he is being confronted.
He will avoid being held to account by using any kind of deceit and usually
call it "His divine leela" or the like. He has seen how devotees swallow everything (well, most of them most
of the time, anyhow). Incidentally, Sathya Sai Baba once claimed in a discourse
that he is 'the lion among animals, the eagle among birds' (Sathya Sai
Speaks Vol 8, p. 13). Since he also claimed that he appeared as a hamadryad to devotees in the past, he is then 'the king cobra among reptiles'. One can
divine what he is driving at... massive pride and no real compassion to anyone
who arouses him, as also pointed out by his one-time chosen 'soul-brother'
in his teenage years (the Krishna who shared his sleeping room for years but
then left him permanently).
The whole approach to every fact by Kasturi, his every perception,
is trained by Sathya Sai Baba and modelled clearly on the belief induced in him by Sathya Sai Baba
that he is the one and only full avatar of God in this aeon. He collected
every scrap of hearsay around in Puttaparthi and applied himself to weaving
it into a euologising hagiography. His 'biography' reads like the systematic
application of Hindu iconography to Sathya Sai Baba, which greatly weakens its credibility
and will surely be seen as unreliable and mostly second-hand hagiography by
religious scholars and researchers everywhere. The mythology is now beginning
to fall apart at the base in that central dates and events have been shown
not to be in accordance with official school registers or even with the calendar.
These are the kind of facts that are of a fundamental and often conclusive
nature for historians and objective researchers of all kinds.
Kasturi never learned journalistic rigour for, though a professor
of history, he engaged a lot in humour and poetry or in radio causeries on
spiritual subjects. It seems that Sathya Sai Baba eventually began to realise that he
needed to sanitise the literature of the unconfirmed and unconfirmable stories
a good deal so as to gain more acceptance among the less gullible community
and more serious persons. When the top professional journalist V.K. Narasimhan
took over from him, initially in the early 1980s, he was instructed by Sathya
Sai not to publish accounts of dreams, healing powers or other miraculous
phenomena... the sort of material in which Kasturi had literally revelled
in Sanathana Sarathi, in his 'biography' of Sathya Sai Baba and in his autobiography.
Narasimhan managed to stick to this fairly well, with lapses here and there.
The Sathya Sai Organisation has taken this suppression of the many fantastic
'stories' much further and, into the bargain, have also virtually banned publicity
about much of what Sathya Sai Baba has repeatedly claimed about himself, his powers and
his miracles... and still claims. This need is dictated by gaining credibility
for its work in extending the Sathya Sai Baba influence and the various works they undertake
(doubtless mostly with the best of intentions) which increasingly require
social acceptance and the public 'blind eye' to the activities of Sathya Sai Baba himself.