Hari Sampath, an Indian software professional now living in Chicago and a former volunteer in the ashram's security service, is petitioning India's Supreme Court to order the central government to investigate Sai Baba. His greatest concern is for Sai Baba's Indian victims, who generally have a much more difficult time speaking out than Westerners do. During his time at Prasanthi Nilayam, he said, many students at the ashram's college told him they were pressured to have sex with the guru. "I've spoken to 20 or 30 boys who have been abused, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are 14-year-old kids made to live in his room and made to think it's a blessing. In most cases, their parents have been followers for 20 years and are not going to believe them," Sampath said by phone from Chicago. "Westerners have little to lose by coming forward. The Indians have to go on living among Sai Baba devotees."

Sampath also wants the American government to intervene, on the grounds that "American citizens have been knowing about this abuse and taking American boys to Puttaparthi and feeding them to him."

So far, the anti-Sai Baba forces have scored a few victories. Many senior devotees have defected. Last September, UNESCO yanked its cosponsorship of an education conference in Puttaparthi, explaining that it was "deeply concerned about widely reported allegations of sexual abuse involving youths and children that have been leveled at the leader of the movement in question, Sathya Sai Baba."

Late last year, after Conny Larsson, a Swedish film star who once traveled the world speaking of Sai Baba's miracles, went public about his coerced sexual relations with the guru, the Sai Organization in Sweden was shut down, along with a Sai-affiliated school. A cover story in the weekly magazine India Today reports that following a story in England's Daily Telegraph, "Labour MP Tony Colman raised the issue in Parliament. A former home office minister, Tom Sackville, also took up the matter, saying, 'The authorities have done little so far and that is regrettable.' There is a movement now to urge the British Government to issue warnings to people wanting to visit Baba's ashram."

Given all this, one might suspect that Sai Baba's following would be in decline. Yet when one looks around Puttaparthi, there seem to be enough bright-eyed converts to replace every defector, enough denial to obscure even the most well documented allegations and, perhaps most of all, enough fierce belief to trump ordinary moral judgments.

July 5 was a festival day at the ashram, a day when Sai Baba addresses his devotees. The faithful started queuing before 4 a.m. to get into the mandir. Arriving at Prasanthi Nilayam at around 5:15 a.m., I had to walk for 20 minutes to get near the end of the ladies line. Women were running and jostling from every direction to join the queue, and I'd have been pushed back about 150 feet if a pretty Indian girl in white hadn't yanked me in front of her. In the end, after waiting for more than an hour, I didn't get in, and ended up sitting outside the mandir in a crowd of hundreds who kept shoving to be closer to the gate, nearer to their lord's sacred energy.

Many of these people believe the official line that the charges are all lies. They're "completely false," said the director of the Sai Organization, a tiny, ancient man who, like every other Indian official I spoke with in the organization, asked me not to use his name because "nobody here works on an individual basis. There is no spokesman besides Sai Baba." He speculated that the accusers are driven by "jealousy or frustration. Maybe they are very ill and not being cured, or they have desires that are not being fulfilled."

Sai Baba, who hardly ever grants media interviews, alluded to the allegations himself at an address last year, saying, "Some devotees seem to be disturbed over these false statements. They are not true devotees at all. Having known the mighty power of Sai, why should you be afraid of the 'cawing of crows'? All that is written on walls [or] said in political meetings, or the vulgar tales carried by the print media, should not carry one away."

But the guru's alleged interest in his followers' phalli is pretty much an open secret among old hands at the ashram. The eerie thing about this story isn't just the evidence of widespread sexual abuse in one of the world's biggest cults -- after all, between the Roman Catholic Church and the Hare Krishnas, one is seldom surprised to find perversity in the shadow of piety these days. What's also strange is that many of Sai's followers seem to accept that their chastity-preaching guru takes young men, including minors, into a private chamber, asks them to drop their pants, masturbates them and occasionally demands blow jobs. They believe the stories, and they believe that he's God.

In an online essay called "Sai Baba and Sex: A Clear View," an American devotee named Ram Das Awle says, "First of all, I believe that Sathya Sai Baba is an Avatar, a full incarnation of God ... AND, from what I've read and heard, I'm inclined to think some of the allegations about Baba are probably true: It appears likely to me that He has occasionally had sexually intimate interactions with devotees." After several rambling paragraphs, the essay concludes that Sai Baba touches men to awaken their "kundalini" energy or to remove previous bad sexual karma, and that "any sexual contact Baba has had with devotees -- of whatever kind -- has actually been only a potent blessing, given to awaken the spiritual power within those souls. Who can call that 'wrong'? Surely to call such contact 'molestation' is perversity itself."

According to Leland (the American ex-motivational speaker), "when he does it, he has a purpose." Leland says he knows a boy of 15 or 16 who was asked to touch Baba's "genital area" during an interview. "Then Baba beckoned him to touch his feet. When the boy looked up, Baba had his robe lifted and a big boner -- a Shiva lingam. Not much else happened." Leland suspects such incidents are part of Sai Baba's plan to spread his word. "Probably more people are going to know about you if there are allegations that you're a pedophile than if you say God is incarnated on earth."

Sai Baba has also been called a second-rate magician. Even some of his believers say they've seen him faking materializations, though to them it's part of his playfulness and ineffability. Yet there's nothing amateurish about his genius for suspending disbelief. Haus, the Swiss follower, seemed to have an open mind and didn't mind discussing the charges against Sai Baba, but he didn't believe them. "I think this is a projection of his devotees' problems," he said. "You hear a lot of rumors here, but for me it's not important. When you're happy, why doubt it?"

He's probably lined up outside the mandir gates right now, one of thousands of men hoping for a talk with God.

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