Sathya Sai Baba movement

From Puttaparthi, Sathya Sai Baba's movement grew into one of India's largest guru organisations under the Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust, which built and continues to operate free super-speciality hospitals, a deemed university, and major rural drinking-water projects funded substantially by international devotee donations; in the early 2000s the Trust was reported to be among India's largest recipients of foreign contributions. Devotion centred on Sai Baba's claim to be a full avatar and on his publicly performed materialisations of vibhuti (sacred ash) and small objects, which professional magicians and India's rationalist movement — led for decades by the critic Basava Premanand — contested as sleight of hand rather than the miracles devotees took them to be.

Alongside that charitable and devotional public face, former devotees beginning around 2000-2001 brought sustained allegations that Sai Baba sexually abused young male devotees and students during private "interview room" access — a structure of largely unsupervised one-to-one contact with minors that this catalogue examines in more institutional detail in its separate entry on the Puttaparthi Sai Baba residential schools, which the same Central Trust operated. The most widely reported individual accounts came from former devotees Alaya Rahm and Mark Roche, both featured in the BBC's 2004 documentary "The Secret Swami," and the allegations were serious enough that concerns about the safety of visiting minors were raised in the UK Parliament in 2002. No criminal prosecution or civil adjudication of the abuse claims was ever completed, since Sai Baba died in April 2011 without facing trial and no court made a formal finding either way; the organisation denied all allegations throughout his life. Separately, in June 1993 four devotees entered Sai Baba's private quarters and, after a confrontation, fatally stabbed two attendants before all four intruders were shot dead by police — six deaths whose motive contemporary and later Indian press coverage described as never officially established, and which Sai Baba himself later said was not an assassination attempt.

After his 2011 death, trust officials opened his previously sealed personal quarters in the presence of tax and banking authorities and inventoried substantial undeclared wealth in gold, silver and cash, prompting renewed scrutiny of the governance of an organisation that had operated for decades around one man's largely unaccountable personal authority over its finances. The Central Trust subsequently professionalised management of its hospitals, university and other institutions, while a rival centre at Muddenahalli, built around claimed "subtle body" communications purporting to continue Sai Baba's teaching after his death, split off a following that the mainstream Trust does not recognise as legitimate. Scoring here reflects the devotional totalism and information control that surrounded the abuse allegations for decades and the unadjudicated-but-persistent nature of that testimony, set against the genuinely open and substantial charitable operations the movement continues to run.