Mission Corrupted
Serguei Badaev February 05, 2004
Sathya Sai Baba (SSB) denotes his mission on earth as restoration of Dharma, that means spiritual and moral ways of life. According to SSB's words morality is a core of spirituality and religion. “For all religions the foundation is morality. If morality declines, humanness will decline together with the eclipse of religion.” (Sanathana Sarathi, January 1990, p. 13.)
In SSB's teachings, as they are propagated by himself and his worldwide Sathya Sai Organisation, so much attention is paid to human values. Generally, five key values are mentioned: Sathya (Truth), Dharma (Righteousness), Shanti (Peace), Prema (Love) and Ahimsa (Non-violence). Highly advertised educational projects of SSB are claimed to install morality in Indian society and all over the world.
SSB proclaims himself as the Supreme Embodiment of Divine (i.e. Purna Avatar) and states that his mission cannot fail. He also mentions India as a leader of this new morality and spirituality among other countries with Russia and the USA as its companions. That means it is in India that we should seek and find an example of a moral and spiritual society as a model for the future.
This scenario does not seem to work out. Many of SSB predictions and prophecies have never been fulfilled. For example, his rather vague and intriguing prophecy connected with his 75th anniversary. «Bhagavan told the group of his students, that His mission can be compared with an aeroplane that is going to take off. Up to 70th birthday his mission would be like an aeroplane going along the take-off track and gaining speed. These days the aeroplane is rushing and speeding up and will take off at the 75th birthday.» (Sai Reflections: The UK Sai Organisation. Quarterly Magazine: February, 1997, p.15. )
How can we check level of morality in society?
One of the features of morality in society is lack of corruption in social and economic life. So level of corruption can be a sort of an index for human values practised in a society.
Here are the data from Internet Center for Corruption Research (http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~uwvw/corruption.index.html) which is a joint initiative of the University of Passau and Transparency International. The Internet Center for Corruption Research provides the TI-Corruption Perceptions Index, a comparative assessment of country's integrity performance, alongside with related academic research on corruption. This is a rather new project and we could obtain data only since 2000, that is the year when SSB promised a dramatic progress of his mission. Data for India are presented in a table.
*CPI Score relates to perceptions of the degree of corruption as seen by business people, academics and risk analysts, and ranges between 10 (highly clean) and 0 (highly corrupt). ** These are rating results among other countries
As we can see, no real improvement in regard with corruption has been indicated through these years and the position of India among other countries is slightly shifting to the end. This is a sad position in comparison with true leaders of the survey for 2003: Finland (CPI=9.7), Iceland (CPI=9.6), Denmark (CPI=9.5), New Zealand (CPI=9.5), Singapore (CPI=9.4) and Sweden (CPI=9.3).
No one of SSB's proponents has been able so far to demonstrate any signs of SSB's global mission rocketing in India. Quite the opposite, about that time the Internet revealed a lot of critical information. That includes allegations that SSB and his Organisation are complicit in a massive cover-up of serial pedophilia, murders and financial irregularities. A public petition has appeared and more than 500 people from all over the world have put their signature there. The petition appeals to all governments, mass media and NGO's to start an impartial investigation of this highly corrupted guru. |