|
[The
following account is based on an excellent editorial which deserves further
mention see here http://home.hetnet.nl/~ex_baba/engels/shortnews/Cybernoon_com.htm]
A. R. Kanangi (Editorial Saturday Nov. 04, 2006) wrote about superstition
being a crutch He said that there is only a thin line between superstition
and faith and that people who are frightened and confused about life
and death want a crutch, even if it is shaky. He believes that the new
law on superstition is necessary and that it will stop some horrible,
cruel practices. As to Sathya Sai Baba, Karangi called him a ‘Clean
Cheat’ (but how clean a cheat one can be is anyone’s guess). He considers
that, had the bill on superstition been passed 45 years ago, “Satya
Sai Baba would have attracted arrest”. He notes how Sai Baba was successful
in cashing on the gullibility of people in claiming to be an avatar
endowed with supernatural powers. Yet he states that “What he actually
did was some cheap tricks like getting watches and kumkum from nowhere
One has
to agree with the editor that today there is a unique phenomenon in
people who derive mileage from superstition and fears in the minds of
innocent, gullible people to make it big themselves. Ironically, once
their own survival is ensured, “they start colleges, hospitals, charity
institutions, industrial units and other enterprises. They use the huge
money they get from worshippers as well as from foreign sources to build
a township.” He notes how people then forget about the cheating and
exploitation and give them a clean chit, imagining that they did not
misuse the funds but used them for collective good. The editor concludes
that their tricks and fraudulence are then rationalised as having been
done in view of a definite goal.
Dirty Money
Washed Fresh and New?
This way
of mentally turning fraud and crime into acts having positive ends is
practiced by Sai Baba in taking dirty money so as to put it to good
use (what Mahatma Gandhi eschewed as ‘blood money’). He has accepted
donations from so-called ‘liquor barons’ and Indian criminals such
as Bangarappa and also has accepted out-and-out Mafia money. Antonio
Craxi (brother of the Mafia-connected Prime Minister Benito Craxi) visited
Sai Baba and was later exiled from Italy for massive fraud. Antonio
reputedly gave Baba millions so as to try to wash off his own guilt,
according to his enemies like Pietro Marena, who eventually successfully
usurped Craxi’s position as leader of the Italian Sathya Sai Organization.
(V.K. Narasimhan told me he had never in his life heard such verbal
abuse as Craxi used against other Organisation leaders!). Who knows
all the dirty money that may be flowing in and out of the unaccountable
tax-exempt ‘God-whitewash’?
|
