RELIGIOUS FRAUD AND WHITEWASH IN INDIA

 

[The following account is based on an excellent editorial which deserves further mention see here (http://www.exbaba.com/shortnews/Cybernoon_com.htm]

A. R. Kanangi (Editorial Saturday Nov. 04, 2006) wrote about superstition being a crutch. He said that there is only a thin line between superstition and faith and that people who are frightened and confused about life and death want a crutch, even if it is shaky. He believes that the new law on superstition is necessary and that it will stop some horrible, cruel practices. As to Sathya Sai Baba, Karangi called him a ‘Clean Cheat’ (but how clean a cheat one can be is anyone’s guess). He considers that, had the bill on superstition been passed 45 years ago, “Satya Sai Baba would have attracted arrest”. He notes how Sai Baba was successful in cashing on the gullibility of people in claiming to be an avatar endowed with supernatural powers. Yet he states that “What he actually did was some cheap tricks like getting watches and kumkum from nowhere

One has to agree with the editor that today there is a unique phenomenon in people who derive mileage from superstition and fears in the minds of innocent, gullible people to make it big themselves. Ironically, once their own survival is ensured, “they start colleges, hospitals, charity institutions, industrial units and other enterprises. They use the huge money they get from worshippers as well as from foreign sources to build a township.” He notes how people then forget about the cheating and exploitation and give them a clean chit, imagining that they did not misuse the funds but used them for collective good. The editor concludes that their tricks and fraudulence are then rationalised as having been done in view of a definite goal.

Dirty Money Washed Fresh and New? This way of mentally turning fraud and crime into acts having positive ends is practiced by Sai Baba in taking dirty money so as to put it to good use (what Mahatma Gandhi eschewed as ‘blood money’). He has accepted donations from so-called ‘liquor barons’ and Indian criminals such as Bangarappa and also has accepted out-and-out Mafia money.  Antonio Craxi (brother of the Mafia-connected Prime Minister Bettino Craxi) visited Sai Baba and was later exiled from for massive fraud. Antonio reputedly gave Baba millions so as to try to wash off his own guilt, according to his enemies like Pietro Marena, who eventually successfully usurped Craxi’s position as leader of the Italian Sathya Sai Organization. V.K. Narasimhan told me he had never in his life heard such verbal abuse as Craxi used against other Organisation leaders!). Who knows all the dirty money that may be flowing in and out of the unaccountable tax-exempt ‘God-whitewash’?