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Holy man or hoax?
2 March 2011 For his 50 million followers, Sai Baba is a profound spiritual leader and guru. But for hundreds of defectors he’s at best a cheat and a liar, and at worst a sexual deviant who preys on the young men who worship him. By Gethin Chamberlain The vast, high-ceilinged hall is overflowing with people, thousands upon thousands of them, craning their necks, eager, attentive, oblivious to the heat of the Indian afternoon, oblivious to everything but the knowledge that they are about to get a glimpse of God. Barry Pittard sits cross-legged on the floor of the ashram. The heady fragrance of incense, marigolds and jasmine fills the air, mingling with the chanting and rhythmic hand clapping, overwhelming his senses. He recalls everything about that first glimpse of the tiny man with the orange robe and huge mop of Afro hair: how the man’s deep dark eyes bored into his own, how the man stopped, stepped off the stage and cut through the crowd towards him. How the man placed his feet against his legs and stood there for a long time. And how Barry knew, with absolute certainty, that he had finally found his guru. “I’d found my home,” says Pittard. “I felt I’d finally come to the place that I’d been looking for all of my life.” Sathya Sai Baba, God, guru, magician is arguably one of the most influential men on earth - and certainly one of the most controversial. He counts presidents, prime ministers and kings (and celebrities like Goldie Hawn and Sarah Fergusun) among his 50 million followers. He sits on a multi-billion dollar fortune, his picture hangs on the walls of hundreds of institutions which bear his name, he claims he can materialize holy healing ash and diamond rings out of thin air and perform miracle cures. He claims he is omnipotent and omnipresent. He has variously described himself as the second coming of Jesus and the reincarnation of the Hindu gods Shiva and Shakti. He is Sai Baba, and his followers believe he is God in human form. But behind the pageantry lies a sinister underbelly. Former devotees say Sai Baba has used cheap trickery to fool the gullible and molested hundreds of young men who trusted him. He is, they say, a man for whom murder has been done, in whose name millions have been misspent, whose dubious miracle cures have cost lives. This is no deity, they say: this is a confidence trickster with a God complex. Like many of the Gurus that populate India, Sai Baba comes from humble origins. Born in 1926 in Puttaparthi, a small village in southern India to a “humble and pious couple”, Sai Baba is said to have displayed signs of wisdom from the start. He was composing songs from a young age, showing an aptitude for magic, and surviving deathly acts, like sleeping in the same bed as a cobra. At age 14 he announced that he was Sathya Sai Baba, the reincarnation of India’s most beloved and storied guru, and declared himself a deity. Within 10 years of this declaration, his devotees had built his first ashram, driven by faith in a man who they were convinced could perform miracles. Today Sai Baba’s influence stretches to every corner of the globe. He has more than 1200 centres of worship in more than 120 countries (there are 44 in New South Wales alone.) The organisation records assets of AUS $1.3 billion, but estimates suggest it may be worth ten times that figure. The once quiet village of Puttaparthi is now a thriving city, bursting with tens of thousands of visitors making pilgrimage to their guru every day. Virtually every surface in the town bears the image of the holy one - a 157cm wisp of a man in bright orange robes with a shock of black hair that stands straight on end, as if electrified. The nerve centre of the village is the Ashram, a vast labyrinth of buildings that include a hospital, a supermarket, a bakery, an ice cream shop, a planetarium, and a sports centre. There are halls that hold 10,000 people (lit by more than 150 chandeliers), and a library stocked full of the guru’s teachings. Every day, the hallways fill with chanting that begins at dawn and continue incessantly throughout the day. Many among the crowd are Indians in traditional dress, but there are also devotees from dozens of countries who travel vast distances to catch a glimpse of the magical man in orange. Some are desperately poor, saving for a lifetime to make just one visit. Others are among the richest people on earth - royalty, prime ministers and titans of industry, who donate staggering sums of money to the organisation. (Among the many outbuildings in Puttaparthi is an airport, built to serve these high-rolling devotees.) All believe Sai Baba to be their one and only God, a man for whom they would do - or give - anything. One such believer is Hard Rock café founder Issac Tigrett. A long-time devotee of the guru, Tigrett credits Sai Baba with saving his life, saying that the guru came to him when he drove his Porsche off a cliff while drunk. Now one of Sai Baba’s most vocal and generous supporters, Tigrett has donated millions of dollars to the organisation, and helped to fund Sri Satyha Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences, a 500-room hospital where all patients are treated for free. (He has also helped to fund many of Sai Baba’s clean water projects, which are said to have transformed the lives of Indians all over the country.) If there’s any doubt how deep Tigrett’s devotion to his guru runs, one only has to look at the motto that runs across the signs of each of his 149 Hard Rock Cafés. It’s the same that wallpapers the surfaces of all of Sai Baba’s Ashrams: Love All, Serve All. But the man Tigrett first came to worship is now 85, and a little worse for the wear. The Afro that used to elongate his meek frame has been replaced by a thin layer of wispy strands. Where once he strode among the devotees sprinkling them with vibhuti (holy ash) which the faithful believed he conjured from thin air, now he is driven past in a silver sedan, his wheelchair - with its white leather and gold-effect trim - strapped into the front passenger side. Afterwards, he sits listlessly on the stage, dabbing at his mouth and nose with a handkerchief, fiddling with his hands. He looks lost, confused. One day soon, the car will come no more. Sai Baba is getting old. Though the strict vegetarian, teetotal non-smoker insists he will not die until 2019, his current fragile physical state suggests his time may sooner. The guru has already promised followers that he will be reincarnated after eight years, but his death is certain to trigger a power struggle for control of an organisation with more influence and financial clout than many international corporations. His departure, however, may prove a blessing for the Sai Baba organisation, because while the guru is their biggest draw, the rampant reports of his sexual abuse have also proven a stumbling block to greater riches. Sai Baba’s alleged fondness for male devotees is something with which Conny Larsson is familiar. When the Swede, 62, first arrived in Puttaparthi as a young man, he felt he had found his spiritual home. But it was not long, he says, before Sai Baba started to call him for private interviews. “He came up to me and said I was chosen. He was all knowing and all mighty and then he produced the holy ash and I thought it was a miracle,” says Larsson. And because he thought Sai Baba holy, Larsson accepted his assurances that there was nothing sexual about what happened next. “He took the thread of my pants and they fell down and he started to oil my genitals. Who was I to question God?” Years later, Larsson wrote him an open letter. “You were supposed to be pure love and have no personal desire or lust other than giving joy to mankind.” Instead, he wrote, Sai Baba had “spiritually and physically molested” him for years. Since the 70‘s, countless men have come forward with accounts of abuse, all familiar: Sai Baba calls them into a private meeting, places his hands on their genitals, then tells them it is not a sexual act. Sometimes he performs oral sex on them, sometimes they on him. Always the explanation is the same: this is an act of God. Many choose to ignore the allegations, and Sai Baba’s army of powerful supporters help to quash the rumours. Last November, more than a million people attended Sai Baba’s 85th birthday; the prime minister and president of India were among them. Former Indian prime minister, AB Vajpayee, has signed a letter defending the guru: “Great men have often faced slander in their lives,” it said. “Such pitiful efforts neither diminish their glory nor slow down their resolve to achieve their mission. May God give good sense to all who create these scurrilous stories and wisdom to all others not to pay any heed to them.” For staunch believers, their relationship with the guru is too intoxicating to give up. Barry Pittard, a Queenslander who spent years working at a local ashram, understands. “ I loved Sai Baba so much, “ says Pittard, “that I gave up everything for him. I thought I had found a wise and great spiritual master, and that my life was finally going to be filled with happiness and purpose.” But in 1982, when a woman visiting the ashram confided in him that Sai Baba was sexually involved with young men, Pittard was aghast. He brought the allegation to authorities, and was promptly cast out. “It was numbing,” he says. But he refused to let it dent his faith. “I translated it in my mind into the notion of the guru testing you.” It was not until 1999 when abuse stories started to mount, Pittard began asking questions. The answers he received convinced him the rumours were true. “It takes a while to get out of the denial,” he says. “But now I can see that he has aggrandised himself, millions have projected their faith and trust on him and he in turn has grossly and repeatedly abused that trust.” When questioned about the abuse, he denounced the allegations as the “cawing of crows”. But complaints against Sai Baba have now piled so high even some of his most ardent supporters accept there is truth in them. In 2004, Isaac Tigrett told a BBC reporter that even though he “absolutely believes that there is truth to the rumours”, it doesn’t change his feelings about his guru. “He could go out and murder someone tomorrow,” admits Tigrett, “and it’s not going to change the good things that have come out of my relationship [with Sai Baba.] Devotee Ram Das Awle agrees, but says that any contact Sai Baba had with young men would have been for their own good: “It seems very likely that any sexual contact Baba has had with devotees, of whatever kind, has actually been only a potent blessing, given to awaken the spiritual power within those souls. Who can call that ‘wrong’?” The United Nations, for one. Shortly before Sai Baba’s 75th birthday, UNESCO [The United Nations Educational, Social, and Cultural Organisation] withdrew its sponsorship of a conference at Puttaparthi, announcing that it was "deeply concerned about widely-reported allegations of sexual abuse”. And the US Department of State has warned travellers to India of the allegations. For many, Sai Baba isn’t just a sexual deviant, but also a cheat and a liar. For years, Sai Baba has demonstrated his holiness by making something from nothing: producing gold from his mouth and making ash magically appear in the palm of his hand. These demonstrations of divinity, says Narendra Nayak, President of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations, are the tricks of a “third rate prestidigitator and manipulator.” According to Naya, Baba fools people with visual trickery. “He produces objects concealed somewhere either in his sleeve or in between his fingers and makes it seems as though they have materialized from nowhere,” he says. “His devotees believe that they are miracles because they are conditioned to believe so from a very, very young age.” Sleights of hand are one thing, adds Nayak, but miracle cures are far more dangerous. “We know people who had cancer and they went to him and they thought that his miracle is going to cure it and then it goes into the later stages where it is incurable.” Robert Priddy, the Baba organisation’s former leader in Norway, knows what it’s like to fall for Sai Baba’s tricks. He was delighted when he first saw the guru conjure a green diamond ring out of the air for him, blowing three times on his fist before opening it to reveal the ‘jewel’ (the stoneturned out to be a fake emerald). “At the time you believe that he is a divine personage and that his attention is a divine blessing. It’s easy to be charmed by him,” he admits. Priddy now believes the holy ash is a powder compressed into pills, made in a machine in Sai Baba’s inner interview room, which he crumbles between his fingers. YouTube has a selection of videos that show the trick in slow motion. Like many former believers, he’s embarrassed about his gullibility: “You want to believe. You can see how all of those people who have access to these facts are still believers. There are people who have left him because of the sexual abuse and have returned because their life became so empty. It is like a honeymoon in the beginning. People think, ‘all my past life has gone, all the bad things have been left behind, now I’m on the right track and they want to continue like that.” Pittard doesn’t think the devotees are the only delusional ones. “I think Sai Baba has deceived himself psychologically and that’s given him the ability to deceive others very well,” he says. If that is the case, the self-deception has been a spectacular success, because Sai Baba appears to harbour no doubts about his divinity: “My power is immeasurable; my truth is inexplicable, unfathomable,” he has told his followers. “I am Truth; and Truth has no need to hesitate, or fear, or bend.” While the death of Sai Baba will pose a challenge, it’s unlikely to hinder the organisation. The love for gurus in India lives long after their passing. (A full 93 years after Shirdi Sai Baba’s death, the man whom Sai Baba says he is the reincarnation of, his devotees raised AUS $1 million in just four days of fundraising.) It stands to reason the passing of Sai Baba will trigger an even bigger outpouring of financial support. And eight years after the death, the search will start for the reincarnation and the juggernaut will roll on. All Larsson and his fellow recanters can do is hope others will eventually see Sai Baba the way they do: “Seeing this old wreck sitting in his wheelchair now it is just confirmation that he was not the god he was claiming to be and it is such a relief to see he is just a human being who has fooled the world,” states Larsson. “He has used the flower power language of love, truth, and righteousness and he has abused the goodness people have in them.”
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Sathya Sai Baba's death triggers fight for his £5.5 billion empire The death of an Indian guru who built up a worldwide following of up to 50 million people has triggered an unholy scramble for control of his £5.5 billion empire. |
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Copyright ©2011 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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