Exposé people are
Christians out to destroy Hinduism
Some Indians say this, but by no means
do they represent the great traditions of tolerance in that country,
nor the ethical imperative: always tell the truth. Given the
pernicious history of colonialism in India, its citizens’ being hurt
at insensitive Christian missionary zeal is understandable, but not
condonable when it extends to kindling hatred and prejudice. As if
there has not been enough of that.
A poll conducted by the Indian The
Newspaper Today, Saturday, September 1, 2001, gave the following
results, which alone reduces to ashes the claim that raising
questions about Sathya Sai Baba is somehow a put-up job by
anti-Hindu Christian activists:
|
TNT Poll
#158
Should the Centre institute a probe into the
allegations against Sai Baba?
|
92% |
 8% |
 Yes
No
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
Archived at:
ex-baba/engels/shortnews/India%20News%20-%20The%20Newspaper%20Today.htm
Many Sathya Sai Baba devotees assume
that any questioning of him equates to a questioning of Hinduism.
However, Hindus at large do not make this assumption in the least.
Travel widely across India and you will know the exceptionally
widespread disdain for him. This is especially due to his emphasis
on miracles, his claim to be the prime manifestation of God in all
history, the vast pomp and circumstance that surround him, his fleet
of luxury foreign cars, his cultivation of the rich, his giving
special seating positions at darshans to the rich, his flattery of
the rich and famous … By the way, his flattery of various visiting
Indian Prime Ministers is, unwittingly, documented across issues of
Sanathana Sarathi, including the case of Narasimha Rao, who
was sentenced to years in jail, convicted on a slew of corruption
charges relating to kickbacks from secret arms deals with the
Swedish firm Bofors.
In 2000, I was a member of a small international group of former
devotees which ran a number of potent exposure operations. In one of
these, we got a 10-page cover story (December 4, 2000) in the
prestigious mass circulation weekly magazine India Today:
archived at:
http://saiguru.net/english/media/001204india.htm.
In eleven languages, millions of Indians read this publication,
which is somewhat like a Time or Newsweek magazine for
India and Indians abroad. Convincing its proprietors, editor and
legal advisors of the good credentials of the Exposé group of Sai
Baba dissenters was a very demanding task indeed. It required
extensive submission of documentary evidence, such as copies of
victim affidavits, the provision of direct access to a number of
Sathya Sai Baba’s victims, evidence of our presentation of the facts
to our own governments, Interpol, FBI, Scotland Yard, CBI New Delhi,
etc.
Predictably enough - see:
ex-baba/engels/letters/letters.html
- some writers of Letters to the Editor of
India Today
levelled the Sai slur that this exposure was all a Christian plot
against Hinduism; again, as though he and Hinduism are somehow
synonymous. Can there be very many educated Indians who think that
Arun Shourie of India Today is a pushover? Such letters
yielded yet another tiresome case of assertion without evidence, of
not being sensitive and intelligent enough to hear the cries of the
afflicted, of ignoring the good community standing of those
furnishing the information to the magazine, and of being blind to
the professionalism of journalist Vijay Thapa and his India Today
team who extensively researched and wrote the story.
In actual fact,
not one member of the Exposé group was affiliated with a Christian
church. All had been typical Sathya Sai devotees who, whether
Westerners or not, had spent years singing Hindu-oriented bhajans
and chanting Sanskrit slokas. Those of us who were Westerners on an
Eastern spiritual path had typically rejected not Christianity, in
some primal sense, but the church - Churchianity.
Characteristically, each of the Westerners involved had the same
love and veneration of Vedic culture as many serious Sai devotees.
Interestingly
one of the letter writers was High Court Judge
Y.V. Anjaneyulu, a
well-known Sathya Sai devotee whose disgraceful flouting of justice
has done far more than a foreigner might do to reveal the corrupt
patronage endemic in the Indian power structures.
B. Premanand, of television’s "Guru Buster’s"
fame, bravely tried and failed to expose Sathya Sai Baba in the High
Court of Andhra Pradesh (in the State where Judge Anjaneyulu’s guru
lives). He submitted that the usage of the gold in Sathya Sai Baba’s
so-called materializations, since it is not declared as strictly
required by Indian law, contravenes the Gold Standard. Justice
Anjaneyulu handed down the ruling that the law requiring a license
to produce gold does not apply to Sathya Sai Baba, who, he
determined, materialises his gold from a divine realm:
http://www.indian-skeptic.org/html/saigold.htm.
The same rigor in our dealings with India
Today has been the case with the press of many countries:
Australia (The Age), Canada (Ottawa Citizen,
Toronto Star, Vancouver Sun),
Denmark (BT), Chile (Gatopardo), Germany (Bild,
Focus), Holland (Trouw), India (India Today),
USA (Salon.com), the UK (Times of London, Daily
Telegraph), Sweden (Göteborgsposten), …
and the National broadcasters of Australia
(ABC), Denmark (DR), Norway (NRK), UK (BBC) and other broadcasters
in Argentina and Holland.
And - coming up - with one of the
major television broadcasting companies in the world!
Despite this sheer quality of
journalistic professionalism, the profoundly shameless Indulal Shah,
recently displaced as head of Sathya Sai Baba’s world organisation
though still in charge of India, wrote a letter (September 18, 2001)
to leaders of the world Sathya Sai Organisation, in which he said
"Devotees, however, must be careful in interacting with the media,
which has a strong propensity for sensationalism. A whiff of scandal
always helps their sales and therefore they do not even pause to
verify the truth."
By thus playing
to many people’s populist images of an irresponsible media, Indulal
Shah dishonestly ignored the credibility of those presenting the
allegations, of the facts and arguments presented, and of the
superior quality of the media which it is our strict habit to seek
out. Typically, it was he who did not “not even pause to verify the
truth," which is the case with so many prominent Sai slanderers – to
name but a few:
Ashok Bhagani, P.N. Bhagawati,
Roger Basham, Bob
Bozzani, Al Drucker, Bon Giovanni, Michael Goldstein, Leonardo
Gutter, William Harvey, Jagadeeshan, Thorbjörn Meyer, Ranganath
Mishra, Chris Parnell, S. Piculell, Indulal Shah, Ken Soman, Jørgen
Trygved, T. Sri Ramanathan, A.B. Vajpayee… All of these are men, in
an incredibly male-dominated Sai milieu.
Where is the Sathya in these peak
Sathya Sai leaders? Where is the leadership of those who ostensibly
lead this so-called ‘divine organisation’? It is their hypocrisy,
whether they come from East or West, that runs the risk of
destroying the good repute of Hinduism to the world at large, which
is why Hindu former Sathya Sai Baba devotees such as Jeyendran Soma
(Sydney, Australia) are now organising to see rigorously documented
representations made in these matters to leading Hindu Councils in
the world.