Charles and Diana rejected by Sathya Sai Baba

Prince Charles was keen to ‘have Swami’s darshan’ but never will

In 1996, Sai-devotee Robert Bruce told my wife and I that he had been present at an interview with Sathya Sai Baba where someone had asked him [SSB] about Charles and Diana and the possibility they might visit him. Sai Baba had replied “They are a disgrace to their country!” These were the verbatim words Robert Bruce reported to me! One may speculate as to why Sai Baba thought this… whether due to the separation or the scandalous leaked ‘phone calls between Prince Charles and Lady Parker-Bowles, or the talk of divorce (which SB strongly condemns) which later also occurred… or whatever else.

Why Sai Baba included Lady Diana when speaking ill of both royals, one does not know… could it have been envy of the way she was truly loved throughout the world ( by hundreds of millions, which Sai Baba is NOT, despite his boasting that he is!)   Sathya Sai Baba himself – and his blind followers – make preposterous claims about having 60 million devotees, sometimes multiples of this. For example, he claimed that 3 million came to his 70th birthday (which is patently absurd to those who can count heads properly and estimate a maximum of 300,000, and even his public relations office published 18,000 fro the total number of foreign visitors).

Prince Charles on a visit to Bangalore

In 1992 at Kodaikanal, Sai Baba gave a ‘privileged’ group of especially humble and admiring foreign devotees the apparent great blessing of attending his evening talks with students in his private summer residence there. V.K. Narsimhan was also present and spoke his piece, as did various others. (These talks and occasional singing etc. were recorded and issued on 6 cassettes, which contained nothing new or of any significance).

However, not included in the recordings was a report from a prominent Sai devotee he was asked to give by Sathya Sai Baba himself about Prince Charles. It was purposely edited out of the recordings. The Prince of Wales had recently having visited Bangalore (this was in 1990 or 1991), had said that he wanted to have “Swami’s darshan’”. Charles had been about to give an address to a conference when he heard that this gentleman was a close follower of Sathya Sai Baba. He took this man aside and questioned him for about half-an-hour. He was said to have told the man that he would visit Sai Baba at his ashram but for the UK Government, which was concerned about the security arrangements (and no doubt about much more). This seems like a very weak reason from the UK government, for here was Prince Charles, staying at a Bangalore hotel open to the public (the Windsor Castle) and moving about in South India without undue security problems. The select band of Western devotees who heard this included my former friends the US devotees Robert and Rita Bruce (who were then sharing accommodation in Kodaikanal with the then leader of the US Sai Organisation, Dr. J. Hislop). The recordings were made, edited and distributed by a most servile and blind believer in SB from Denmark, Erik Henriksen.

That Sathya Sai Baba thinks Charles and Diana ‘a disgrace to their country’, one would ask what of his own secret activities for which he dare not stand up and answer? Is this unaccountability in the face of such weighty charges of serial homosexual assaults – including defenseless minors in his colleges and in private interviews – and his widely reported complicity in cold-blooded murder not itself a major disgrace to India and a blot on the reputation of every leader, Prime Minister and President who worship, support and protect him? (see BBC’s ‘The Secret Swami’ in short clips and transcripts here)

Duchess of York, ‘Fergie’ visited Sai Baba

On this background, it is interesting that ‘Fergie,’ the Duchess of York, visited Sai Baba at his ashram (in early February 1997) and was directly granted two interviews, she evidently being a more important person for Sathya Sai Baba than ordinary devotees. This was reported in the UK and Indian press. A female devotee, Terrie, who has assisted with the Sunrise website wrote me, “I happened to be at the ashram during her visit, where the ladies were far more interested in having darshan of Fergie than darshan of Sathya Sai Baba. They not only craned their necks toward Fergie during darshan, they also lined up in front of her after darshan (right on the walkway Sai Baba takes when he leaves), with notebooks and pieces of paper in hand for her autograph. They almost gave Fergie as much adulation as they gave to their supposed God Incarnate, Sai Baba. Apropos, this accords with our own experiences of visits by the Indian President and Prime Minister, on whom all Indian eyes (and many foreigners’) were glued most of the time. One wonders if perhaps it can get routinely boring watching Sathya Sai Baba go through the same old darshan routines and extremely repetitive discourses day after day?

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