Murders in The Abode of Supreme Peace temple – 1

In case anyone might forget these horrendous murders and their cover-up by the Government of India, the graphic description needs to be circulated once again. This murder case will haunt Indian authorities for decades to come, and very rightly so. It is not even one of the most serious miscarriages of justice, because no form of justice was allowed for any of the bereaved or those affected by Sathya Sai Baba’s staff purges of ashramites whose lives had been dedicated to service under the figurehead of Sathya Sai Baba.

The Prashanthi Nilayam temple (mandir) is the massive building where the 3 domes are covered with gold – the residence of Satya Sai Baba with a plinth area of 35’x90’ with a first floor of the same dimension. The ground floor from left up to 75 feet length is used as a prayer hall and the end rooms on the right is used by Sai Baba for personal interviews with a staircase leading to the first floor which is occupied by the godman, his personal aide Radha Krishna and other body guards including the trust member Col.Joga Rao. Tehelka Com November 29,2000 article states that the Sathya Sai Baba is ringed with two concentric circles of Israel-trained and armed security personnel, close-circuit television, wireless communications with Uzis slung on their shoulders.

When actual murders were carried out and Sai Baba got the case closed, this alone proves he is not one practising Sathya Dharma, Shanthi and Prema. Note  the entrance to the interview room on the ground floor where selected devotees wait. 

We see photos of the interview room where the four Sai Baba aides are alleged to have been stabbed by the four alleged assailants out of which two died. The blue door leads to the staircase leading to the first floor. Strangely the wooden throne used by Sai Baba while giving interviews is missing in the room. There is a pool of blood in the centre of the room on the left side which is alleged to have gushed out of the stab injuries of the four aides.

There is a stick in the middle of the blood pool and a metal rod at the end of the blood pool facing the blue door. How these happened to be in the room is not investigated.

According to the FIR it is alleged that the four assailants entered into Baba’s ground floor room on pretext of handing over a telegram to Baba and the four aides objected them and that said assailants attacked and stabbed them with daggers indiscriminately. It doesn’t look like 8 persons (four aides and four assailants) were fighting and being stabbed When someone attacks, one does not stand still but try to evade the attack and escape. So the stabbing would not have happened at a particular place. If four had fallen down after being stabbed indiscriminately there would have been their foot marks and body marks in the blood pool. The splashed blood would have been in different places in the room. There are rope pieces strewn around the spattered blood. The police have not investigated who were tied with ropes – the alleged aides or the alleged assailants.

If someone had tied the alleged aides with ropes, the question of the assailants stabbing them does not arise. And if the alleged assailants were tied with ropes murdered and shifted to Sai Baba’s and Radhakrishna’s bed rooms, the question of the jumping on police to kill them do not arise. Therefore the police drama of firing 31 rounds of bullets was a farce. These rope pieces prove that the aides were not tied by the alleged assailants nor were they stabbed by them.

Moreover the feet of the 4 assailants would have been drenched with blood if they had stabbed the aides went to upstairs to do away Swamy as stated in the FIR there would have been foot prints of blood leading to the stairs but the floor after the blood pool leading to the door is clean without a speck of blood.

Bottom right is the staircase with doors open (the photograph seems to have been made up out of two exposures). While there are no footprints in blood on the floor after the door, surprisingly blood is seen sprinkled on the steps and 3 streamlets of blood flowing up to the floor on the doorsteps. This is unnatural and the police have not explained how the blood suddenly appeared on the doorsteps and the stairs. They also do not look like the footprints of blood of the four assailants. So if it was true that the four assailants had indiscriminately stabbed the four aides, their foot prints in blood would have been seen surely on the floor and the stairs or where ever they walked. Also when the door to the stairs is seen closed, it is strange that the blood has splashed on the stairs.

See also

• Murders in Sathya Sai Baba’s ‘Abode of Supreme Peace’ – 3
• Murders in ‘The Abode of Supreme Peace’ [Prashanthi Nilayam -2

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Sathya Sai Baba’s promises part four

In many public discourses promises Sathya Sai Baba talks about his extremely caring support for his devotees. People who are drawn to him – often because of personal problems of all kinds, including searching for the meaning of life and protection from its vagaries and sufferings – long to believe that these ‘divine assurances’ are always fulfilled. Alas, they seldom are! When something seems to result from a prayer, it will no doubt just as well be the result of natural processes and events. When prayers are NOT fulfilled, which is certainly so int the overwhelming majority of instances, devotees full of faith overlook this or fall back on the large set of stock ‘explanations’ why this is so!  Even the voluminous amateurish ‘literature’ praising Sai Baba and relating the most incredible stories (sic) contain occasional reference to big letdowns of this kind. Yet it is all too obvious that many instances likely to awaken suspicions or doubts are not talked about in these books, which are always strongly self-censored. When one talks freely to people at the ashrams or in Sai Baba centres and groups around the world, one meets and hears of all the failures, uncured visitors, disappointed sufferers. Sathya Sai Baba’s close attendant and editor for 20 years,  V.K. Narasimhan, startled and shocked me once by saying that he had never seen a single genuine cure by Sathya Sai Baba in all the years he had been living close to him! Narasimhan himself was told his eye was cured with vibuthi ‘made’ on the spot for him, but within two days he has lost it completely!

Sathya Sai Baba and ‘miracle cures’: The hagiographies about Sathya Sai Baba’s ‘miraculous’ cures are many, where the quality and accuracy of the writing is under all criticism in most cases. Due to the nature of his alleged ‘methods’, no scientific control study has ever been made of any of the claims of miraculous healing by him, neither spontaneously nor in answer to prayers. This is not to say that he, like thousands of others of reported ‘healers’, cannot have been involved in a healing process through faith, if only as a catalytic agent on whom one projects prayer, faith and hope. Meanwhile there are a any number of reports by those who have sacrificed and prayed to Sathya Sai Baba constantly for themselves or for another, but all of whom have only got worse! Of course, the handy theory of past bad karma is trundled out to explain away the possibility of a cure in this or that persons’ instance. All evidence that Sathya Sai Baba does not heal, does not keep his word, or is not able to heal people of himself has to be refuted by the ‘true believer’, whose agenda is totally to block out all experience that may lead to another explanation or in any way be interpreted to reduce their hard-held belief that Sathya Sai Baba is a divine healer and God himself. Even devotees who feel the need to keep up a front despite themselves not having been healed according to Sathya Sai Baba’s promise will convince themselves that they have been helped… and even lie about this, such as Mrs. Phyllis Krystal did about the headaches she claimed Sai Baba cured her of (after being asked point blank in public at the 1990 Sai Baba conference in Hamburg). However, she was still suffering from them for years afterwards, as Lucas Ralli (with whom she stayed when in London) informed me most definitively and to my great surprise. (See here)

I have shown from his own discourses how Sathya Sai Baba teaches many mere superstitions, falsehoods or speculatively imaginative half-truths. Further, his abysmal level of his ignorance of basic physics, astronomy, and most non-Hindu religion and history has been demonstrated to the full on exposé websites. Nonetheless, he has said intelligent things (and nowadays at least such is an exception rather than a rule). He may indeed be right in claiming that ‘healing’ comes only from within, and this is caused by the faith (that healing will occur) by the person who gets cured (Conversations with Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba – by Dr. John Hislop. page 121, later edition). But he says this of absolutely all cures. However, who can deny that medicine is the decisive factor in the vastest number of known cures of diseases, illnesses, accidents and so forth. This he has to admits awkwardly somehow in that he allowed the building of two hospitals with major funds contributed by devotees. He has also said that a doctor’s kind approach has the greatest healing effect (Sathya Sai Speaks Vol. 26, p 47), which – if correct – shows that healing is not only  ‘from within’. Nor ‘from God’, of course. In his confused accounts, Sai Baba fails to mention the huge importance of genetic factors in illness and healing… and of the natural regenerative powers of all living creatures (who know or worship no God) and also the human psycho-physical entity. One can say that healing comes from within in a quite different sense to religious speculations about the existence of a supposed divine soul!

Is vibuthi a medicine, can it heal? All the talk about the healing power of ‘Sai Baba vibuthi’ and other substances he hands out may cause belief in healing, and this may help… but the actual curative/medicinal properties are zero, according to analyses of this vibuthi made in laboratories here and there. The apparent cure due to this substance (actually the ash from burning such materials as cow dung, rice husks or sandalwood etc.) is often called the ‘placebo effect’ in medical research. Another term used is ‘spontaneous regeneration’, which refers to unknown aspects of the body’s self-regenerative powers. The ‘placebo effect’ is obviously a psychic phenomenon and remains largely (but not entirely) unexplained…. but it is very common.This is almost indubitably the key element in so-called ‘faith’ healings.

One will find no record of the overwhelming number of cases where vibuti is applied but no cure whatever arises. I have documented on well-known instance (see ref. to widely-known fact among residents and VIPs: V.K. Narasimhan’s loss of an eye after application fo vibuti by Sai Baba himself!). I witnessed the dying days of a Norwegian devotee – Mrs. Fotland – to whom I had brought a handful of packets of vibuthi given me especially for her at an interview by Sai Baba. Further, as leader of the Sathya Sai Centre in Oslo, I have seen vibuti applied countless times without the desired result, also in the ashrams and elsewhere.

Prashanti Nilayam vibuthi manufactured in Palani factory: It is known that tons of vibuti are ordered by Prashanthi Nilayam from Palani (near the foot of the Kodai mountain in Tamil Nadu) where ‘vibuty’ is manufactired in quantity. I was friends with a former Seva Dal servitor, Krishna Panjwani of Bombay –  a very sweet elderly gentleman – who annually travelled around and bought supplies for the Prashanthi Nilayam shop he supervised – in the heat of summer when Sai Baba was away on holiday in Kodai. He used to go to Palani to get vibuti, and an invoice published by Basava Premanand showed the details of one such purchase of a huge amount. See here:-

Copy of invoice for 9 tonnes of 'vibuthy' to Prashanthi Nilayam by Palani General Stores!

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Visiting Sathya Sai Baba ashrams (photos)

Necessary information for visitors to Sathya Sai Baba’s ashrams

If you have read and heard about Sathya Sai Baba and his ashrams, you may be expecting it to be ‘The Abode of Supreme Peace’ to be either a paradise or at least a place where people are more virtuous, kind, fair and civil than elsewhere.

The control of some important public information concerning security and other concerns at Sai Baba ashrams is very tightly censored and is held going by very strong social taboos against telling any facts that could reflect badly on the ashrams or Sathya Sai Baba himself. It is wise to learn some of these facts in advance so as not to be too disappointed or endanger oneself.

Getting ahead of the crowd: There are many people who obtain various privileges, some granted officially, some through bribery or personal connections. To go to the head of a queue is allowed for VIPs and students, there are ways of getting chits from the public relations office for a special front place at darshan, and of getting favoured accommodation, often in return for favours to staff (such as under the table donations). The so called ’special guests’, referred to generally and treated as ‘VIPs’ can go ahead of cripples and the blind, and they do so as a matter of course even in there is no observable reason for their haste. This is a cause for envy in many, and I mention this because many devotees believe that all who point out such things are merely envious, jealous etc., as Sai Baba himself is ever insisting about his critics! (Presumably he imagines – or hopes – that everyone is envious of his blessings!).

There are any number of deceitful washerwoman, coolies, taxi drivers, baggage thieves and pickpockets in and around the ashrams… so do not be too trusting in the belief that this ‘Abode of Supreme Peace’ is a paradise free of crime. Far from it! It is, however, generally safer inside the ashrams than outside, because tricksters mostly pick out foreigners for their ploys. Be aware of people trying to get assistance for bogus stories about relatived dying without drugs or blood transfusions – one typical scam among many others.

Why are you going there? Sai Baba has often said that the majority of people coming for something they want from him, not for spiritual reasons and not to do service. One can easily observe who is who on this basis. The pleading faces and begging postures of devotees and many of the staff – and not least the so-called VIPs or ‘special guests’ bears out that most followers came to get something rather than give anything.

Some gain favours by sitting inordinate lengths of time in the ‘lines’ hours before darshan would begin so as to get a prominent place (regardless of others whom they thereby displace), doing so month after month until Sai Baba could hardly fail to reward them without seeming very hard-hearted. [Among such persons who became VIPs were Bernhard Gruber, Erik Henriksen of Denmark, Rita Bruce of the USA]

Prashanthi Nilayam sthula

Who to avoid: Those who strive in all ways to become important in the movement are mostly self-important, self-seeking and often uncivil persons who one should avoid entirely. Most Central Coordinators are like that, unless one treats them as superiors all the time and never asks difficult questions. The battles for prominence are seen to take place daily in the run-up to darshan, but are just as intense at groups and centres around the world among those who take up office in the Sathya Sai Organization.

Residents of the ashram – especially Indians – are know to ‘fight like dogs’ (quotation from former administrative head of Vidyagiri). Hence, Sathya Sai has said: ‘Residents of ashram have derived little benefit’ Sathya Sai Speaks Vol. 27, p. 78: ‘Residents at ashram who have aged but not grown’ Sathya Sai Speaks Vol. 10, p. 28: and ‘Seniority imagined by long-term residents’ Sathya Sai Speaks Vol. 5, p. 306).

The degree of bitterness and recrimination is sometimes so intense that it is extraordinary that such persons can pose as followers of Sathya Sai Baba’s teachings. To my knowledge, such battles for domination of a Centre or National Council have raged for years in the UK, in Holland, Eastern Europe and Russia, Venezuela, Argentina, Colombia and not least India… to name some.

Sathya Sai by rail – vain  attempt to make Puttaparthi a Tirupati

Devotees from abroad who live long-term or permanently at Sai Baba [particularly vintage ashram ladies] develop a noticeable ‘residential patina’ which seems to serve as protection against all the abrasions and scours that they receive regularly from the native powers-that-be, from members of the Seva Dal, other residents, visitors and the inevitable low caste workers of all kinds. The ashrams are full of people doing nothing except take care of their own quotidian affairs… no service work, no proper study or self-discipline… just following the routines, spreading rumours and ‘stories’, learning how to ‘cut corners’ and generally look after themselves. Very few people there – foreigners included – are at all helpful in giving a helping hand to newcomers. So, if you must go to this spiders’ web or find you have entered ‘a snake pit of envy’, be self-reliant!

VISITING SAI BABA ASHRAMS (2)

Newcomers who have read some of the many gushing, over-rosy books about Sai Baba’s supposed perfection, purity and total overview and divine control of his ashrams and the intimate detail of everyone’s lives, expect ‘The Abode of Supreme Peace’ to be either a paradise or at least a place where people are more virtuous, kind, fair and civil than elsewhere. Many devotees from abroad who live long-term or permanently at Sai Baba develop a noticeable ‘residential patina’ which seems to serve as protection against all the abrasions and scours that they receive regularly from the native powers-that-be, from members of the Seva Dal, other residents, visitors and the inevitable low caste workers of all kinds. Particularly vintage ashram ladies have this veneer, along with carefully adopted Indian traits like perfect use of saris, outwardly condescending attitudes towards newcomers. I have never seen or heard of more than an exception few of these people doing anything except take care of their own quotidian affairs… no service work, no proper study or self-discipline… just following the routines, always knowing how to ‘cut corners’ and generally get ahead of others. The experience of many followers who I have accompanied to Prashanthi Nilayam as group leader was that very few people there – foreigners included – are at all helpful in giving a helping hand to newcomers.

From public discourses by Sathya Sai we learn: ‘Residents of ashram have derived little benefit’ Sathya Sai Speaks Vol. 27, p. 78: ‘Residents at ashram who have aged but not grown’ Sathya Sai Speaks Vol. 10, p. 28: and ‘Seniority imagined by long-term residents’ Sathya Sai Speaks Vol. 5, p. 306).

A Vigilance Officer – a government official in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) – Mr. V. Ramnath, who moved about in India (eg. Madras, Coorg, Bangalore, Delhi) – himself a Sai follower – told me many of his experiences of people around Sathya Sai Baba. These included a variety of close Sai Baba devotees who were friends or relatives of his (some of whom I met)- including high officials in the Indian administration and in Sai institutions and ashrams. He said that people really believe that, once they have a place at Puttaparthi or Whitefield so they can spend their time near Sai Baba at darshan etc., they have done everything required for salvation! Because being within the area of ‘divine vibration’ ensures their spiritual development. They proceed to live lives empty of social or other useful meaning, waiting for heaven to fall into their laps like ripe fruit through gratuitous grace. In the rat-race to ‘Swami’s feet’, otherwise fairly virtuous persons there become as vicious as piranhas, very jealous of those who get interviews or other ‘grace’, whom they defame through back-biting. (This view is supported by many talks Sai Baba has held, both in public and not least in very strict correctives to the assembles Seva Dal in the various ashrams.

AT SATHYA SAI ASHRAMS – 1

Wonderland or Disneyland? Paradise or Purgatory? Life or death?

All is not as it seems to be to the wannabe spiritual persons who visit, and – if one hopes to be accepted by Sai Baba and his minions – one may not tell things as they are.Unlike those who – knowing no better – paint wholly unrealistic and imaginative pictures of the place and what goes on there (such as the present author unfortunately was guilty of to a considerable extent in one of the books he has published), those of us who have happened to get behind the scenes or have penetrated the many deceptive appearances and calculated disinformation, many a sad fate, and all manner of untoward incidents, covered-up crimes and deceptions. For example, who knows that the great Sai Baba has been made to fall full length on the concrete by a male devotee who flung his arms around his ankles while he was moving? The man who did it got his head beaten severely against the concrete by Sai Baba’s attendants, the cowards! Who tells that a foreign lady made a scene of herself by running out of the ordered lines and lying down on her back and heaving her body while shouting “I will give birth to the next avatar!” Or that a young Danish lady daily stripped naked and ran around the ashram shouting ‘Love, love, love!’ while none of the servitors dared to go near her for days.”

Sathya Sai’s original and chief ashram, now the independent township of Prashanti Nilayam – a fiefdom over which he rules completely – is supposed to be “The Abode of Supreme Peace”… a sanctuary from worldly problems full of saintly people. The meaning of the Indian word ‘ashram’ is a place of ‘no hardship’ (‘a-shrama’). So it is should be a refuge from the cruel world. However, it is far from being any utopian retreat! The forceful, pushing crowds, the discriminatory culture (VIPs or nobodies and all in between), the physical, mental and emotional hardships one is made to suffer all help to ensure that. One elderly Indian devotee in the IAS (Indian Administrative Service) – Mr. V. Ramnath  who wrote the excessively hagiographical book ‘Waiting for Baba’ – had long experience of the ashrams and many officials and residents (about which he carefully omitted any of the many negative facts he told me). He assured me it is “a snake pit of jealousy”. The former Head of Administration for over 20 years, Mr. Kanhaia Jee, also told me many such incidents and home truths about the ashrams – not least that the Prashanthi Nilayam (‘Abode of Peace’) staff  “fight like dogs” when Swami’s back is turned!