A decade ago, an ardent devotee of the Satya Sai Baba based in the United States donated `600 crores to the Satya Sai Central Trust (SSCT), which oversees the large number of charitable activities being undertaken across several countries.
From the early 1970s, the numbers of Sai Baba’s devotees have been rising across the globe. Even as thousands of Indian devotees throng to Puttaparthi, many hundreds of devotees are flying in from countries as far apart as Iceland, Chile, Brazil, Uganda, Russia and Baltic countries to have their last “darshan” of their revered spiritual leader.
A senior office bearer overseeing the work of the SSCT, speaking on the phone line from Puttaparthi, pointed out that Sai Baba had approximately 23 million devotees from which five million were foreign devotees, who were largely members of the 5,000 Sai Centres being run across the globe.
These were hubs where devotees gathered to pray and participate in community services.
Prof. G. Venkatraman, a retired scientist previously associated with the Department of Atomic Energy and presently running the Radio Sai, pointed out that the numbers of foreign devotees were steadily rising because “these centres were places for people to pray and meditate and to undertake social activities”.
Prof. Venkatraman cited how in several African countries, including Zambia and South Africa, Sai devotees went around distributing blankets, cooking oil and vegetables to the poor.
“During the tsunami which hit the Indian coastline, it was the Sai devotees who picked up a large number of corpses since no body else was willing to do so,” he said.
Many of these foreign devotees are known to be extremely affluent. Prof. Venkatraman cited the example of Dr Michael Noble (a distant relative of Alfred Nobel), an agnostic, who would frequent the Puttaparthi ashram because he found it charged with spiritual energy.
Detractors of Satya Sai Baba point out that even if these devotees were making modest contributions amounting to $0 dollars per month over a period of a decade or more, the amount of contributions received by the Satya Sai Central Trust ran into several billion dollars.