It has always amused me to see how people are so gullible as to fall for the cheap tricks employed by the “Godmen”. The crook hires a few actors who pretend to be sick or handicapped. He then calls them on stage, mumbles something or touches them with his “divine fingers”, and then – they are cured! Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! Its a miracle! Of course there is a choir playing some religious music in the background to numb the senses of the audience. At this point of time, the crook’s sidekicks pass out buckets among the audience to collect money “in the name of the Lord”.

Sathya Sai Baba (born in 1926 as Sathyanarayana Raju Ratnakaram ) is Indian guru. He is described by his followers as a miracle worker and a spiritual teacher, but all this is very questionable. He proclaims himself to be an Avatar, what means a divine incarnation sent to Earth.

According to his followers, his birth is supposed to me miraculous. His mother Easwaramma was walking one day when a huge sphere of blue light rolled towards her and made her faint. She was dreaming of a Hindu god Sathyanarayana and then found out that she was pregnant. This is just a fairytale which should convince his followers that he is exceptional, but he is just an ordinary man. When he was in elementary school, he once started behaving strangely “as if a scorpion had stung in his foot” and afterwards fell into a coma. It is interesting that such events have very “profound” meaning among his followers, but my opinion is that occult forces produced this state. Few months later he proclaimed himself to be the incarnation of Sai Baba of Sirdhi and because of that he took his name. Later he proclaimed peace with sentences like: “Love All, Serve All” and “help ever, hurt never.”

In 1944 he built a small temple near his village, and in 1948 he started to build a shrine Prashanthi Nilayam, for those that have devotion to him. He also built a University with three Campuses and two Hospitals.

On 6 June 1993 six people were killed in this shrine. The “official version” of this event was that four of Sai Baba’s devotees who were living in this shrine, went to his residence with knives. They were stopped by four Sai Baba attendants before they came to his room. There was struggling and two of his attendants were killed. Sai Baba escaped through a back stairway and raised the alarm. The assailants ran and locked themselves up in sai baba’s bedroom. These people were found dead later. The police report stated that they attacked the police with knives when they entered the room.

The Central Investigation Department stated that the police report was full of lies and inconsistencies. Others, including V.P.B. Nair (Former Secretary to the Home Minister of Andhra Pradesh), Sanal Edamaruku and Basava Premanand claim that these people were deliberately shot and that political influence of Sai Baba kept the investigation from proceeding.

Connoly Larsson used to be a close devotee of Sai Baba for 21 years and Leader of the Swedish Sai Baba organization. He broke away from the movement, later , outraged on witnessing the Baba’s behavior of a sexual nature with a young boy and then the boy’s own mother who was waiting outside being deceived by a sleight-of-hand “materialization”. On his website he describes what really happened in Prashanthi Nilayam. All 6 students were deliberately murdered by the police. They were displaced later to back up the story that four of them attacked Sai Baba, and two of them died defending him. That is a lie. All 6 students were his devotees and they were coming from families that were engaged in selling Sai Baba pictures, rings and other things. There was disagreement between various families in Puttaparthi because some families had certain advantages. That was the reason that they intruded on Sai Baba. All of these student knew that Sai Baba was sexually abusing children so they had something to blackmail him with. That is what made Sai Baba angry and he locked them in his bedroom and called the police.

Considering that Sai Baba already had a large political influence he ordered the police to kill them. The bodies were found later with gunshot wounds through the eyes and palms of hands (there are photos on internet that prove this). It is impossible that they attacked the police with knives because they couldn’t have such wounds. These people were murdered and then displaced in order to set up the scenery to back up the police story. One policeman later confirmed that knives didn’t even belong to students. You can find all about this events on Conny Larsson’s website.

BBC created a documentary “The Secret Swami” which shows true face of Sai Baba. BBC journalist Tanya Dutta states: “Some police officers were arrested but never charged. The case was eventually dropped. Sai Baba has always had a close relationship with the police. Even today, senior officers are special guests at the Ashram. With friends in such high places Sai Baba seems to be untouchable. Any attempt to investigate the goings-on at his Ashram — even, murder — appear doomed to failure.

There was another case of alleged murder. On 20 February, 1987 they found a body of a student at a college run by the Sathya Sai Trust in a semi-charred state. This case was dismissed as suicide. Narendra Nayak, writing in the Indian Skeptics Journal, opined that the “powerful force around the Baba got the [police] inquiry turned into a farce.” He notes that circumstantial evidence did not support suicide being a plausible cause of death.

Basava Premanand, one of India’s fake-guru busters, claims that he is not just a fraud but also a dangerous child abuser. In his letter to Shri M.P. Veerendra Kumar he described other murders that were connected with Sai Baba. Here are quotations from these letters:

“The first murder I came across was the case of a business man found hanging in the ashram premises. Then another hanging by a girl at the Satya Sai Women’s College at Anantapur and the then principal of the college Mrs. Damayanti Doongaji resigned from the institution.”

Another of his disenchanted followers is Tal Brooke. After his studies he explored religions from Far East and red books of many Hindu gurus like as Sri Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi, Sri Aurobindo, Paramahansa Yogananda and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He travelled to India in 1969 and in 1970 he encountered Sai Baba. He became his follower with several other devotees from western countries. He was disenchanted with Sai Baba when he found out that he had sexual relations with several of his male devotees. These devotees also told him that Sai Baba could change into a woman instantaneously and that a man had sexual intercourse with Sathya Sai Baba as if Sai Baba were a woman.

After that he left his “spiritual teacher” and converted to Christianity. Tal Brooke wrote a book “Lord of the Air” in which he describes Sai Baba’s “spirituality”. He published his book also in India under the title “Sai Baba, Lord of the Air”.

All these cases show that Sai Baba is a fraud and that his spirituality is not just a fake, but also very dangerous.