Sathya Sai apologist J. Jegathesan and suicide

Jegathesan’s Face Saving Email To Devotees – and Sai Baba’s Inhumane Call For A Suppression of Grief

‘Datuk’ J. Jegathesan  will most likely fail to rid  himself  from delusions about indisputable aspects of the true nature of Sai Baba. Unfortunately, Jega cannot allow himself to begin to see what any level-headed outside observer will conclude is at the root of his loss and the role he has unavoidably played in it all. There is no doubt that Jegathesan has suffered a great deal, yet enough time has now passed to permit that questions be raised about Sai Baba’s role in the incidents around his son’s suicide and more – in the public interest.  Jegathesan began the e-mail he circulated with:-

“It is with totally uncalled tears in my eyes and heart (for Bhagavan Baba has said that “under no circumstances should we cry), that I am conveying to all those who have worked with me for so many years in the leadership of the International Sai Organisation, about the passing away of my youngest son, in very hurting and sad tragic circumstances.”

Jegathesan’s self-torture and ‘guilt’ about having shed tears is pitiful to read… the more so since Sathya Sai Baba himself was clearly seen to shed tears while holding his public discourse at the funeral of his brother, Janakiramiah! Perhaps no wonder that Sai Baba was so attached to that younger brother, who arranged for the infamous cold-blooded executions in his bedroom for him through blackmail of the police chief of Puttaparthi. But Jegathesan is undisturbed by this glaring fraudulence and even wrote:-

“Little did I realize that my Divine Father was preparing me for the events that would confront me on Friday 27th Feb. 04.”

How his own reading of the usual old doctrines helped prepare him for those events, heaven only knows! His account shows that the event certainly hit him like a bombshell and left him in distress and confusion, wondering how to understand and/or rationalise it. This demonstrates how unrealistic and vague one’s ideas become under the influence of Sai Baba’s vague interactions and mind-programming ‘teaching’. Many studies have shown that suppressing the grieving process is extremely harmful to human well-being, and his discouragement of it reveals his irresponsibility and lack of fundamental emotional maturity.

Sathya Sai Baba’s and the fathers’s relation to the boy who later took his own life

Given the grief to which many boys and young men have come to in Sathya Sai Baba’s hands, it is not idle to wonder whether Sai Baba had given this fair, good-looking boy all reason to be unwilling return to any interviews? Note that Jegan (unlike Jegathesan himself) had no interviews after 1996 – the last one being two weeks after his mother’s death (it is uncertain if he had any interview before that, though his father wrote: “my son has had the grace of a number of personal contacts with Bhagavan, the latest being in Nov. 1996.” Why such sudden cessation of only the son’s interviews – not long after the ‘great impact’ of his mother’s death led to what Jegathesan calls a ‘mild depression’. Not surprising that the son, labouring under very moralistic and fundamentalist Sai Baba belief system within which he grew up, later became extremely confused with more depressive and apparent psychotic periods.

The extremely strained father-son relationship

“One day he became totally irrational, and began to find faults with me and members of the family and even his office staff and close friends.” Jegathesan determined that his son’s criticism of himself were without rational foundation, yet note that he also rigidly regards the slightest criticism of Sathya Sai Baba to be the same!. Jegathesan’s world-view is of the kind that is certainly considered ‘totally irrational’ to most educated people… involving spirits and deities of the 4th dimension, the Creator of the entire Universe embodied in his guru Sai Baba, and much weird and wonderful besides (as already partly documented here and here).

Sathya Sai VIP leader preaching at captive audience

Not taking his son’s various outbursts at face value and following them up seriously, Jega tells how he took the complaints against himself as symptoms of mental illness. With his status in Malaysian society and connections, his son was taken into psychiatric observation. The focus was thus put entirely on his son, and not on the dysfunctional and overbearing father. It would certainly seem that his son would no longer agree  with many beliefs and actions of a very authoritarian parent. (Jega’s e-mail shows he had a traditional Indian family relationship of the repressive father type – whose feet-touching padnamaskaar his son must perform, whose workplace his father arranged, whose girlfriends are vetted and wished-for bride rejected etc.)

Of course, it is not impossible that this and the strained family situation, plus the diagnosed ‘stress’ triggered a latent (genetic) schizophrenia in Jegathesan’s son.  Nonetheless, invalidating someone as ‘mad’ has been shown to be widely used as a means of placing blame on those whose opinions or minds one otherwise can’t control (eg. Laing and Esterson’s ‘Sanity, Madness and the Family) . Add to this, the intensity of the dramatic events directly linked to the onset of his natural depression at his mother’s death.  More on this in a later posting.

The poor young man must have been helpless before the rigidly held dogmas of Jegathesan about Sathya Sai Baba as Lord of All Creation, Pure Love and Purity, and far more excessive claims besides. Being under the virtual ‘mind control’ of this guru personality cult from birth onwards can obviously cause huge problems when one has to interface with the adult world of rational people and all-too-real events. His father is well known as a very active and intransigent promoter through his constant lecturing and ‘leadership’ of the Malaysian Sathya Sai Organization of what amounts to the control of the minds of devotees.

See also latest on Jegathesan

Malaysian newspaper report on suicide of Jega’s son with related issues

Full text of e-mail circulated widely by Jegathesan
Dato J. Jegathesan, a ‘Secret Swami’ cult top leader-roving ambassador
Sathya Sai Baba reported as shedding tears daily!