THE 'SAI-LENCING' OF CONSCIENCE-RAISED VOICES - I WAS HEEDLESS OF SERIOUS WARNING SIGNS

For twenty-five years, I adored and served Sai Baba, thinking that he personified love and service to mankind, and that he was without blemish. At the beginning of 1978, I volunteered my teaching services to him, which he accepted, and taught English for two years at his Whitefield College (for boys) just outside India’s fifth largest city, Bangalore. Mostly very happily, I lived round him for periods of three years, seven months, and eight months (1977-80; 1981-82; 1997-98). In fact, in November 1991, I resigned from my college teaching job in Australia and wrote full-time for three years a book, yet to be published, on my direct experiences, tentatively - if drearily - entitled, “Sathya Sai Baba - A Power In and Beyond His Form.”

Apart from a brief viewing of accusations on the Internet just prior to my departure to spend a few months with Sathya Sai Baba, November 17, 1997 to August 14, 1998, until in October 1999, I read three NEXUS magazine articles, mentioned below, I dismissed no fewer than nine accounts of sexual abuse by Sai Baba, five of which I had heard between 1978 and 1982, and the rest between 1997 and 2000. It was only over a period that I was able to retrieve some of the memories, which suggests the powerful conditioning which obscured them.

In 1981, after I had returned to Australia from spending three years around Sai Baba, my much-respected neighbour Connie R. of Cooma, in the State of New South Wales, because of a friend's and my accounts of some of our experiences of him, decided to visit Sathya Sai Baba. On her stopover in Malaysia, she visited a family with a history of Sathya Sai Baba devotion, whose address had been given to her by a Sai devotee guest of mine, Stephen T. (of Melbourne). She said that she heard a disturbingly authentic cassette tape of an Indian Malaysian boy’s account of sexual molestation by Sathya Sai Baba. The boy had attended the Sathya Sai college at Whitefield, where I had taught for two years. Horrified, his parents had withdrawn him from that institution. Convinced of the truthfulness of the account by the boy and by the family, and deeply disgusted, Connie R. cancelled her trip.

We now learn that, over the years, many parents have withdrawn their children from Sathya Sai Baba’s educational institutions, concerned that their children are at moral risk from him and from a sexually perverse and secret culture that he has created.

Let Sathya Sai Baba's educational authorities or his world organization try to deny these withdrawals. They do not dare. Nor do they disclose such facts to the many community leaders and institutions they try to involve in some of their projects. Nor to the rank-and-file members of the Sathya Sai Organization. Nor to parents and enquiring parents at Sai Schools in different parts of the world.

Barry Pittard

from http://www.exbaba.com/articles/barrysailencing.html