Whitefield Sathya Sai College defections (1980s)

Referring to a long-standing Sai devotee friend who lived for decades in Prashanthi Nilayam, Eileen Weed (who first began to live there in 1984) wrote:-
“She said in the mid 1970s, soon after she arrived in India, there was an event like that, when many students just left the college in disgust. Another time that it happened was soon after I arrived in 1984; we had heard many boys walked out of college because of something which we never learned details of. That was when sb did not go to Whitefield for 18 months (waiting for the controversy to die down, no doubt). All of us, even those like me who were generally clueless in the early days, heard about the mass exodus of walk-outs in the Whitefield college in 1984.“

The above refers to an episode that was well-known to persons involved at Brindavan College at the time, but about which all information was systematically suppressed by the entire Sai Baba movement, as indeed has been and continues to be the policy. Barry Pittard, who lectured in English for two years from 1978 at Sathya Sai Baba’s Whitefield College, wrote:- 

“When I returned from Australia to India in 1983, I heard that the Whitefield college had been closed down, and that a number of parents had withdrawn their boys from Whitefield college because of sexual abuse scandals, in which SSB was central.” This came after Barry had defected from his nearly 3 decades of service to Sathya Sai Baba’s mission, having finally been convinced of the sex abuses when the magazine Nexus published a damning article. Barry has written:-

“Until the NEXUS article, I dismissed for many years as absurd no fewer than nine accounts of sexual abuse by Sai Baba, five of which I had heard between 1978 and 1982, and two shortly before I read the article, the rest between 1997 and 2000… Between 1979 and 1982 I heard four stories relating Sai Baba to homosexuality: from Joseph (U.S.A.) in 1979 (see below); Donna (U.S.A.), perhaps in the same year; Connie Raadsma, a close neighbour of mine in Australia 1981; and an Australian woman who spoke to me at Puttaparthi Sai Baba’s chief residence, in 1982. Like myself, Joseph and Donna were of the tiny handful of long-stay Westerners Sai Baba then permitted to live around Sai Baba, mostly in Whitefield. Donna, who Sai Baba had long not permitted within ashram precincts, claimed that she had spoken to older Puttaparthi residents who said that Sai Baba had been homosexual even as a boy. It appears to me now that Donna may have opened her mouth a bit too widely.

In 1979, in the crowd awaiting Sai Baba’s public appearance (darshan), Joseph, one of three or so – including Om (U.S.A.) and Trevor Freeman (U.K.) who remained after the hippies and others had departed from Sai Baba in the late sixties, began to talk out aloud – very audibly. I sat very near. With ever-increasing upset – indeed moral outrage – he repeated that some college boys had told him that Sai Baba had asked a number of them (in Joseph’s words) to “line up and masturbate.” On the third or so day of Joseph’s dark rumblings, six hefty Indian male service volunteers came and carried him out, ordering him not to return. None of the thousand or so who were present can ever forget the struggle that the immensely powerful Joseph put up, shouting out the accusations no doubt for all to hear. An hour afterwards, one of the same volunteers told me that his duty (which he clearly regretted) was “like wrestling a tiger.”

A very distressed Indian man said to me, “If Sai Baba is God, why do they need to use all this violence against this man?  I have begun to uncover the case of an admired and quite close teaching colleague of mine, P.K. Mohanti, at the Sathya Sai College at Whitefield. Sadly, he was instantly removed from the college before we could say our goodbyes. Again, it seems to relate to being ejected for speaking out against abuses.”

NOTE! Since this was posted, a former Sai Baba student has mailed me, asking for anonymity, and wrote:-
“…the 1983-4 batch defections at the Brindavan campus….this was always a hush-hush affair and many senior teacher know about it though they were uncomfortable talking about it. What angers me most is the mental stubborness of those professionals at parthi who know these things and still continue to work for the sake of money or whatever.How can they call themselves educated ….this reflects the very flawed status of the Indian upbringing…men are not what they can be but brainwashed to believe whatever they are told. It’s a very unfortunate thing.“