Remarkably, there are very few devotees of
Sathya Sai Baba who choose to sign up with their full names or contact
details when they post on bulletin boards. Hundreds
of Sai Baba supporters have submitted negative threatening or vile
comments to the Guestbook of ExBaba.com or sent in mailforms without daring
to reveal their names or even to use valid e-mail addresses. (At
least half of all such postings have reportedly been rejected by the webmaster).
Likewise, t
Sai officials and adherents
who retire to the shades
Those leaders and devotees whose names are known mostly put
themselves forward before Sathya Sai Baba’s many alleged crimes
were commonly known and before it was realised that – once shown
the Internet – all information given can be indelibly and permanently
recorded, not least by others. Today those supporters of the insupportable
(i.e. Sai Baba’s megalomaniac claims etc.) have become very
shy of any personal publicity which can identify them! Even
many Sai-promoting website owners fail to give their correct names
or any contact details. Every one of the hundred or more Sai Baba
discussion groups is moderated rigorously to exclude any posting
which is remotely critical of Sai Baba! (This fact can be checked
by anyone who cares to view them or join up!). That no devotees
anywhere dare enter any discussion which is not entirely in praise
of Sathya Sai Baba says a great deal about the censorship and fear
of openness, and further proves that this is an authoritarian cult.
Since the exposure of Sathya Sai Baba by many critics
and alleging victims of his sexual abuses on the Internet began
around 2000, his whole movement has closed ranks and turned in
on itself ever more noticeably. Yet for many years before that,
the Sathya Sai Organisation was already secretive and legally
unaccountable, increasingly hiding the contact details of its
members and remaining legally unincorporated in most countries
(thus to stay unaccountable in any way), along with other concealment.
The stigma of public association with Sathya Sai Baba is causing
more and more of his organisation office-bearers and members to
conceal their identities and e-mail addresses on the Internet
and in the media. This mounting evidence of the clearly cultist
behaviour of Sai Baba followers is encouraging
for the future of the exposé.
Glaring
Publicity and Silence on Issues
In earlier years, many Sai Baba devotees strictly followed his advice not to engage
in publicity for him. He claimed his success was ensured without
the need for any publicity whatever, and he banned all such. All
that has now changed! Meanwhile, he continued to blare out in
discourses (relayed in print, film and other media) pronouncements
of his own marvellous deeds as exceeding anything ever done by
anyone on earth. Eventually, his leaders took his own lead and
began lavish publicity events around the world. When the scandals
broke onto the Internet in 2000, he
pronounced in 2000 that
no followers should use the Internet. Sai Baba's thus made a divine
faux pas (since he always claims omniscience and omnipotence).
A very large number of insubordinate devotees soon ignored this
edict by the infallible Creator of the Universe, and he has since
accepted and financed websites and radio stations on a large scale
as a necessary supplement to his propaganda machine.
Sai devotee websites and bulletin boards are even more censorious and unquestioning than the Sai discussion groups, and no genuine thinking or the mildest hint of criticism is ever voiced. This further testifies to the fear of public scrutiny. Only after six years of silence did the official Sai apparatus - falsely imagining that they had won in a US court case - take the chance of dealing with the allegations in an article posted on the official Radio Sai website by the second-in-command of the Prashanthi Council, Dr. G. Venkataraman. He has since been answered very thoroughly and fully rebutted with complete documentation. See also the true statement of the facts about the lawsuit of Alaya Rahm by the International Just Group, the Rahm family and their lawyer, which clearly shows that Venkataraman has tried in his posting on the Prashanthi website roundly to deceive the public as to what occurred.
Any candour would need to look at the seriousness of the crimes being alleged, and at the almost endless string of wholly absurd and false claims made by their founder about himself. Only at Sathya Sai Organisation meetings can members feel safety in numbers and be shielded from awkward questions and commonsense concerns, all sharing and reinforcing the same (often false) beliefs and hosting the same disinformation, which they therefore can never have examined intelligently or independently.
Defenders
who shrink away from any discussion
It is a notable fact that but a handful of devotees - except those
who live within the cocoon of the ashram and its catch-all belief
system - stepped forth to defend Sathya Sai Baba against the
many and cogent criticisms on the web. The reason is evidently that
they could not show that his critics were wrong about his absurd claims
and beliefs, impossible predictions, self-contradictions and frequent
outright lies. These are largely documented - and undisputedly so
from his own published discourse - and otherwise from reliable and
cross-checked sources.
Devotees
and politicians who are followers also try their utmost to ignore
and/or suppress the many serious allegations against Sathya Sai Baba of homosexual abuses from around the world and the well-known facts about unsolved
cold-blooded shootings in June 1993 of four young men in his
bedroom. These extremely awkward facts obviously cramp the style
of many proselytising ventures and detract seriously from any
public acceptability among most of the world’s population, despite
his claim that the whole world will come to him soon! Such matters
have to be carefully avoided in their public meetings, where they
are bound to present Sai Baba only as a doer of good works and
an example of nothing but pure and unbounded love, or at most
as the greatest Divine Incarnation and miracle worker who has
ever lived!