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COVER
STORY: SAI BABA
The
Decision That Changed It All
The
numbers may have been larger than usual but the adulation and the atmosphere
could hardly have been unknown to Sai Baba. He is after all among India's
most enduring godmen; 60 years have passed since teenaged Sathyanarayana
Raju returned home from school, flung away his books and told his sister-in-law,
"I am no longer your Sathya, I am Sai", the reincarnation of
the Sai Baba of Shirdi.
That "Grand
Declaration" changed an individual's destiny-and a village's too.
From a nondescript hamlet, Puttaparthi is now a fairly bustling town.
It has a floating population of 10,000 on normal days-adding 50 per cent
to its fulltime strength-and survives thanks to the Sai Baba industry.
In the fortnight
leading up to the birthday, as Prasanthi Nilayam and its surroundings
buzzed with the activity of the World Sai Conference, the convocation
of the SSS Institute of Higher Learning-a deemed university, the vice-chancellor
of which is S.V. Giri, former Union education secretary-and numerous other
functions, Puttaparthi commerce was in its elements.
It was "festival
time" and so the Sai Santosh Hotel trebled its room rent from Rs
350 a night on November 21 to Rs 1,000 a night 24 hours later. Italian
devotees arriving hours before the birthday bash paid Rs 1,000 for a bed
and a pillow in the foyer of Hotel Sai Plaza. Close by, the "World
Peace Cafe & German Bakery" did brisk business offering, among
other items, yak cheese sandwiches, Danish rolls, French bread, bagels,
vegetarian tacos, cinammon sticks from China and two brands of decaffienated
coffee, one Swiss the other American. Puttaparthi was catering to the
world.
No doubt
Sai tourists also dropped in on the 50 Kashmiri carpet sellers who have
set up shop in Puttaparthi, the Tibetan curio shop that has opened and
the textile and handicrafts mela that invited itself to the birthday celebrations.
As always in India, the economics of religion could be matched only by
its politics. At the birthday celebrations, Joshi was kept company by
Congress MPs S.B. Chavan and Shivraj Patil and a whole host of minor politicos.
From P.V.
Narasimha Rao to N. Chandrababu Naidu, every Andhra Pradesh chief minister
has paid obeisance to Sai Baba. The two exceptions have been the late
Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy, who was, like the Puttaparthi savant, a native
of Anantapur district, and N.T. Rama Rao, who with his inclinations towards
ochre robes and divinity, thought of Sai Baba's charisma as a rival to
his own.
Where netas
go, babus follow. The bureaucrat club was present in great numbers at
Puttaparthi this past week. H.J. Dora, the director-general of police
in Andhra Pradesh and Sai Baba's chauffeur when the religious leader visits
Hyderabad, was at hand. So was P.L. Sanjeeva Reddy, secretary, Department
of Company Affairs at the Centre.
Over the
years Sai Baba's establishment has been served by a galaxy of civil servants.
Former Andhra Pradesh chief secretaries I.J. Naidu and K.V. Natarajan
worked for him after retirement. Another former IAS man, P. Sitapathi,
is now Sai Baba's pro. K. Chakravarthy, an IAS officer of 20 years standing,
resigned from the government in 1981 to become registrar of the Institute
of Higher Learning and is now secretary of the SSS Central Trust, the
fulcrum of Puttaparthi.
P.N. Bhagwati,
former chief justice, and Y.V. Anjaneyulu, formerly of the Andhra Pradesh
High Court, are members of the Central Trust management committee. So
too was Justice V.B. Eradi till he was removed recently and Justice Padma
Khastagir till she died. Former air chiefs O.P. Mehra and N.C. Suri are
Sai Baba devotees. Just before he took over as chief of army staff, General
S. Padmanabhan visited Puttaparthi.
This intense
concentration of power is both a handicap and an asset for Prasanthi Nilayam.
The civil servants bring with them their penchant for shadowplay. Crowds
are meant to be controlled to the point of regimentation. The press is
an unnecessary obtrusion. Subordinates practically click their heels and
address senior ashram functionaries as "Sir". In some ways,
it is the spiritual answer to Delhi's Shastri Bhavan.
The other
side of the story is that Sai Baba is the sole veto holder. He balances
the equations between competing coteries and keeps everybody on their
toes. So when it comes to the smallest decision, only "Swami"
can take it-but nobody has the courage to ask him to. Like so many institution
builders, Sai Baba believes in centralised command. This has its pitfalls.
When the charges of paedophilia (see accompanying story) began being levelled,
nobody at Prasanthi Nilayam was ready with a counterattack.
Today, even
the murder attempt on Sai Baba in 1993, in which his driver and cook died
and the four disciples turned alleged assailants summarily shot by the
police, is linked to inter-coterie warfare.
Despite
the intrigues, for literally tens of millions of people around the globe
Sai Baba is an object of reverence. While he himself says, "I am
God and you are also God. There is latent divinity in us all", for
the believers he is the embodiment of the Almighty. "Can an ordinary
mortal retain a youthful look? Without wearing glasses or wrinkles?"
asks a wonder-struck Mitsuru Iwakai, a Japanese creative arts student
spending six months in Puttaparthi.
Where does
Sai Baba stand in the pantheon of the mystical men of the east? In terms
of political clout, he can be matched only by the late Chandrasekhara
Saraswathi, the shankaracharya of Kanchi who died at 99 in 1994. While
the shankaracharya's influence was derived from an ancient seat, Sai Baba
is a self-made preceptor. In a society governed by a strict caste hierarchy,
his family's origins as a cowherd people of the Bhattaraju community-consanguineous
to the backward caste Kapus and analogous to the north Indian Yadavs-have
never been an issue. Nor is Sai Baba a jealous god. You can worship Christ
or Krishna or Allah, he says, and still believe in him. This has obviously
widened his appeal.
As opposed
to the libertine permissiveness of a Rajneesh, Sai Baba is quite conventional,
men and women not being allowed to live or eat together in Prasanthi Nilayam.
Against the philosophical profundity of a Jiddu Krishnamurthi or a Swami
Ranganathananda, Sai Baba may appear embarrassingly epigrammatic: "What
is youth? You Think Like Hanuman"; "Help Ever, Hurt Never."
Even so, he seems to speak the language-if not in words in wavelength-of
the individual disciple. Followers explain he dumbs down his message to
reach a larger audience.
That last
point really is the key to Sai Baba's future plans. He has predicted that
he will die in 2022 and, eight years later, be reborn in Gunaparthi village
of Karnataka's Mandya district to a woman called Kasturi. His next avatar
will be called Prema Sai Baba and will have nothing to do with Puttaparthi.
In his early
days, Sai Baba used his "miracles"-in 1990, P. Ramachandra Reddy,
Hyderabad anaesthetist, recalls, "The Swami's miraculous healing
helped cure a paralytic attack in my left arm"-to gain a following.
Now he realises there is need for a more lasting impact, in the form of
schools, hospitals and drinking water projects. The first 74 years have
been spent converting the individual into the institution. The remaining
22 will be a shot at immortality.
-with
Methil Renuka and Lakshmi
Iyer
Pg.1
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Orthodoxy in economic thought is as odious as obscurantism in the socio-religious context. INDIA TODAY Associate Editor, V Shankar Aiyar, offers a contrarian take on the stock markets and the cause and the impact of policy and practice. 
