THE 'SAI-LENCING' OF CONSCIENCE-RAISED VOICES

 

 

Date: 06-17-04

 

Author: Barry Pittard

 

Email: bpittard@beachaccess.com.au

 

(Excerpt 1. from my book being written - 'Amazing Disgrace') 

 

Between 1979 and 1982 I heard four stories, described below, relating Sathya Sai Baba to homosexuality:  from Joseph (U.S.A.) in 1979; Donna (U.S.A.), perhaps in the same year; Connie Raadsma, a close neighbour of mine in Australia, in 1981; and an Australian woman who spoke to me at Puttaparthi in 1982. Like me, Joseph and Donna were of the tiny handful of long-stay Westerners he permitted to live around him, mostly in Whitefield I taught for two years at his college there), about 20 km from Bangalore, India’s fifth largest city. Donna was now one of a few Sathya Sai Baba forbade from entering his ashrams but who, ever faithful, would stand outside the gate straining to glimpse him. She claimed that she had spoken to various older Puttaparthi residents who said that Sai Baba had been homosexual even as a boy. (Note:  expert evidence attests that most homosexuals do not practice child molestation). Perhaps Donna was expelled from the ashram for opening her mouth a bit too widely! Let us see in a moment what happened to Joseph when he opened his. And what happened to me, too.

 

In July 1982, acting only out of care for her (and indeed for all who may hear such stories), the moment I passed on the Australian woman's concerns - who in great anxiety had sought me out for advice as having lived at the SSB ashrams extensively - to two of Sathya Sai Baba’s top leaders Howard Murphett (Australia) and Richard Bayer (USA) about allegations of his homosexuality, I was called up to the office day after day by the Puttaparthi ashram manager, Kutumb Rao, a retired High Court Judge, confronted with patently ridiculous accusations, and on the forth day told "Swami has asked that you be sent out, and never return." (One of the accusations was: You were seen in the ashram talking to a woman." It can only have been the Australian woman who came up to me in distress).

 

In 1979, in the crowd awaiting Sai Baba’s public appearance (darshan), sat Joseph. Called a hippy by the village children (who may have been right), he appeared to be in his psychodelic thirties, and was one of three or so Westerners remaining after the hippies and others had departed from Sai Baba in the late sixties. Joseph began to discourse, for all of us to hear – and I sat just behind him. With rising stress levels and moral outrage, he said more than once that some college boys had told him that Sai Baba had asked a number of them (in Joseph’s words) to "line up and masturbate." On the third or so day of Joseph’s dark rumblings, six hefty Indian male service volunteers (seva dals) came and carried him out, ordering him not to return. The immensely powerful Joseph fought them, roaring out the accusations for all to hear. A very distressed Indian man said to me, "If Sai Baba is God, why do they need to use all this violence against this man?" An hour afterwards, one of the volunteers told me that ejecting Joseph was “like wrestling a tiger.” He told me that his task saddened him, as he had known Joseph for so many years. 

 

For the next days, while people awaited darshan (Sanskrit:  viewing of a holy person), Joseph climbed a tree outside the ashram wall, and cried out the allegations for us all to hear. Then, he was gone. I heard from my close friend and local resident, Siva Subramanian, a Tamil who knew some of the Tamil police constables, that the Kadugodi police had badly thrashed Joseph and sent him on his way. So much, then, for the cardinal doctrine of ahimsa or non-violence in Sathya Sai Baba’s ashrams and in the land that still daily venerates Mahatma Gandhi along with the Dalai Lama, the towering apostles of non-violence.