Ever since I first joined
the Sai Organisation in 1983, there were occasional flurries of rumours
that Prince Charles had visited Sathya Sai Baba (SSB) in secret during
one of his several visits to India. One story told how Prince Charles
was greeted during his wedding to Diana by a Sai devotee with the words
‘Sai Ram’ which – so the story goes – was acknowledged by HRH as he
walked down the aisle! This is the kind of wishful thinking that Sai
devotees believe and spread, along with no end of absurd claims and
impossible stories, as a visit to Sai sites on the Internet soon clearly
shows. However,
it is known to many Sai devotees that the Indian immigrant, Manhubhai
Patel of Wembley, has been sending books about Sathya Sai Baba to Prince
Charles since the 1960s and that, as he told me himself, he has received
letters of thanks for these from the Palace.
The UK newspaper Daily Express published an unconfirmed report in 1990
that a representative of Prince Charles had written to Sai Baba requesting
that the Prince could visit Sai Baba, and that this request had been
turned down by a letter from the ashram authorities.
Therefore I decided to ask
V.K. Narasimhan about this. Narasimhan (now deceased) was the journalist
who - as Editor-in-Chief of the Indian Express Group - won India's top
journalistic award (the Goenka prize) for his brave and single-handed
exposure of Indira Gandhi's Emergency. In his retirement he edited Sai
Baba's monthly journal and clearly felt extremely flattered to be a
close confidante of Sai Baba. Narasimhan immediately and definitively
told me that Prince Charles had certainly never written to nor visited
Sai Baba. However, some years later around 1996, he told me that a letter
had been received by Sathya Sai Baba from Prince Charles, which Sai
Baba had shown to him and asked him to answer. He was not allowed to
tell the exact contents of that letter. He wrote to Prince Charles and
reminded him of his own journalistic meeting with him in India when
the Prince was but a teenager. He had later received a friendly but
also somewhat formal reply, as far as I recall the details.
Of course,
it is well known (and much publicised by the Sai movement!) that Keith
Crichlow, the man who was urged to visit Sai Baba by Isaac Tigrett of
Hard Rock Café fame (as
interviewed on BBC TV about Sai Baba) who was the the donor of US
$49 million for a 'Super-Speciality' Hospital near Puttaparthi ($15 million
disappeared - embezzled by Sai officials!). Crichlow was induced by Sai
Baba into designing the Hospital (partly modelled on the lines of Buckingham
Palace), and then became a close associate of Prince Charles, who was
later made head of the Prince of Wales’ Institute of Architecture in the
UK. Keith Crichlow is still a visitor to Sai Baba in India and is still
also connected with Prince Charles.
In 1992 at Kodaikanal, Sai
Baba gave a selected gang of especially humble and admiring foreign
devotees the apparent great privilege of attending his evening talks
with students at his residence there. VKN was also present and spoke
his piece, as did a number of others. (These talks and occasional singing
etc. were recorded and issued on 6 cassettes, which proved to contain
nothing new or of any significance). However, not included in the recordings
was a report from a prominent Sai devotee he was asked to give [by SSB
himself] about how Prince Charles, recently having visited Bangalore
(in 1990 or 91), had said that he wanted to have ‘Swami’s darshan’.
The Prince had been about to give an address when he heard that this
gentleman was a close follower of Sathya Sai Baba. He had allegedly
taken this man aside and questioned him for about half-an-hour about
Sathya Sai Baba. The Prince was said to have stated that he would visit
Sai Baba if it were not for the UK Government, which was concerned about
the security arrangements. This seems like a very weak reason from the
UK government, for here was Prince Charles, staying at a Bangalore hotel
and moving about in South India without security problems. However,
that was what the select band of Western devotees, which included the
long-term and privileged US devotees Robert and Rita Bruce (who were
then sharing accommodation in Kodaikanal with the then leader of the
US Sai Organisation, Dr. J. Hislop) and other persons I knew, were allowed
to hear.
Charles and Diana rubbished by Sathya Sai Baba
Subsequently, in 1996, Robert
Bruce told me that he had been present at an interview with Sathya Sai
Baba where someone had asked him [SSB] about Charles and Diana and the
possibility they might visit. Sai Baba had replied "They are a disgrace
to their country!" These were the verbatim words Robert Bruce reported
to me! One may speculate as to why Sai Baba thought this… due to the
separation and not least perhaps because of the leaked 'phone calls
between Prince Charles and Lady Parker-Bowles. This could not be applied
to Diana, however, so perhaps it was just the fact of their divorce.
Sai Baba has make quite clear in public and in interviews that he is
very much against divorce. However, in his typical self-serving and
inconsistent way, he has also sanctioned and even encouraged divorces
(eg. Diane Baskin’s).
On this background, it is
interesting that 'Fergie,' the Duchess of York, visited Sai Baba at
his ashram (in early February 1997) and was directly granted two interviews,
she evidently being a more important person for Sathya Sai Baba than
ordinary devotees. This was reported in the UK and Indian press. A female
devotee, Terrie, who has assisted with the Sunrise website wrote me,
"I happened to be at the ashram during her visit, where the ladies were
far more interested in having darshan of Fergie than darshan of Sathya
Sai Baba. They not only craned their necks toward Fergie during darshan,
they also lined up in front of her after darshan (right on the walkway
Sai Baba takes when he leaves), with notebooks and pieces of paper in
hand for her autograph. They almost gave Fergie as much adulation as
they gave to their supposed God Incarnate, Sai Baba. Apropos, this accords
with our own experiences of visits by the Indian President and Prime
Minister, on whom all Indian eyes (and many foreigners') were glued
most of the time. One wonders if perhaps it can get routinely boring
watching Sathya Sai Baba go through the same old darshan routines and
extremely repetitive discourses day after day?
In rubbishing
Prince Charles and Princess Diana before a group of Westerners, could
Sathya Sai Baba have simply been jealous of their fame, or piqued because
they had not rushed to his ‘lotus feet’? His constant boasting in numerous
published discourses about how the whole world loves him and will eventually
have to come to his holy feet would appear yet emptier of substance when
Princess Diana was doubtless more admired and loved and by far more people
(apparently hundreds of millions?) than Sathya Sai Baba has ever been!
He makes preposterous claims about having ‘n million’ devotees (sometimes
it is 60 million, sometimes multiples of this), having claimed that 3
million came to his 70th birthday (which is patently absurd to
those who can count heads properly and estimate a maximum of 300,000).
That
Sathya Sai Baba thinks Charles and Diana 'a disgrace to their country',
one would ask what of his own secret activities for which he dare not
stand up and answer? Is this unaccountability in the face of such weighty
charges of serial homosexual assaults - including on defenseless minors
in his colleges and in private interviews - and his widely reported
complicity in cold-blooded murder not itself a major disgrace to India
(see BBC's
'The Secret Swami')?