LIFE IS full of moral quandaries. Your waiter has undercharged you? Do you tell her? You dent someone’s bumper in a car park. Do you leave a note on their windscreen? A) “Of course!” or B) “Naaah! Who cares?” Well how about this one? You have just been told that the “living god” you worship is a predatory homosexual paedophile who pressures his followers’ children into performing sexual acts, and then threatens them with terrifying consequences if they tell their parents. How do you respond?
The reporter Tanya Datta put this question to Isaac Tigrett, the multimillionaire founder of the Hard Rock Café, in Secret Swami (BBC Two). She was referring to the alleged antics of Sri Sathya Sai Baba, an Indian holy man with a Jimi Hendrix hairdo and more than 30 million followers worldwide. We had just heard testimony from the sons of two sets of American followers that Sai Baba had got them to drop their pants, oiled their genitals and got them to perform or receive oral sex. One lad said that, despite Sai Baba being approximately half his height, he had tried to climb up his back and mount him.
Tigrett’s response was instructive, though I am not sure exactly of what. First he conceded that the allegations could possibly be true. Then he said that Sai Baba “could go out and murder someone tomorrow. It’s not gonna change my evolution”. I would put this somewhere near answer B) above. It is also wonderfully illustrative of the infuriating self-absorption of hippie mysticism. “Hey man. Get out of my face, man. Can’t you see I’m evolving here?”
This was a gruesomely gripping programme that raised all manner of perplexing issues. Tanya Datta herself seemed to feel a strong and entirely understandable desire to expose a man she sees as a wicked and manipulative charlatan who enjoys the protection of politicians and police alike.
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Yet it also demonstrated that Indian mysticism means something very different in India and in the West. If a bunch of Californians, Germans or Brits choose to follow a gobbledegook-spouting guru, it is essentially a lifestyle choice. It may be deeply sad. It may be genuinely enlightening in some way. But they can snap out of it just as soon as their Inner Rationalist decides to wake up and smell the coffee. It is a pity if they sustain psychological damage in the process, but, hey, what are therapists for?
In India the pressure to conform to the cult is of a different order altogether, and seems to be bound up somehow with the psychological management of mass poverty.
Datta recounted an incident in 1993 in which four young male followers armed with knives had burst into Sai Baba’s quarters and attacked his retainers, killing two and seriously injuring others. Sai Baba himself escaped down a back staircase. When the police arrived they shot all four attackers dead, claiming self-defence.
Datta, and the former Home Secretary of the living god’s state, Andhra Pradesh, seemed convinced that the police, in effect, executed the lads so they would never get the chance to explain why they wanted to kill Sai Baba in the first place. Well, other countries’ armed response teams can be equally trigger-happy, but Datta was suggesting that the atmosphere in India could be very threatening to anyone who tried to damage Sai Baba’s image.
Some of the outgoing government’s most senior politicians were devotees, and when Datta tried to interview a former minister, he lost his temper with her, implying that she was behaving disrespectfully. Indian governments have a long tradition of hostility and resentment towards the BBC, but even so, his display of anger brought home the weight of official support that Sai Baba seems to enjoy. At least the son of two kookie Californians can describe his abuse on camera. Indian farmers’ sons may not be so lucky.
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I loved the elderly “guru-buster” who tours remote villages in his rationalist battle-bus, demonstrating the simple conjurers’ tricks Sai Baba uses to perform his “miracles”. It’s amazing how easy it is to make it look as if you have just coughed up a sacred golden egg or whipped a diamond-encrusted watch from thin air. If your gift of jewellery turns out to be fake, by the way, that is because you are impure. He was ploughing a lonely furrow, but at least he seemed to give hope that one day education might overcome fraud and superstition. Until you remember California.
A far greater complication, however, lies in the fact that Sai Baba is clearly doing a great deal of good. Isaac Tigrett’s money, for instance, has paid for a huge high-tech hospital in the middle of one of India’s poorest states. It was designed by a devotee, one of the Prince of Wales’s favourite architects apparently, and looks like a cross between the Brighton Pavilion and a Battenberg cake. The living god also financed a £40 million pound project to bring clean fresh water to hundreds of villages. You shouldn’t have to weigh sexual abuse and cheap con-tricks against alleviated suffering and saved lives. But if you do . . .?
In Nights from Hell (ITV1) sufferers from various sleep disorders dreamt that they were attacked by hideous hags who tried to kill them, beat up their pillows, raided the fridge and in one case possibly stabbed his wife 40 times, all while asleep. Infra-red cameras revealed terrifying disturbances but there was little explanation of causes or possible cures. It was so unsettling I felt like finding a guru myself.