Ever
since I first joined the Sai Organisation in 1983, there have been flurries of
rumours that Prince Charles had visited Sai Baba in secret during one of his
several visits to India. In the 1980s an Indian immigrant to UK, Mr. Manubhai Patel of Wembley, who ran a Sai Baba bookshop there, told me that he had since the 1960s been regularly sending books about Sathya Sai Baba to Prince Charles, c/o the Palace. He had even received a formal letter of thanks. At the same time, he said he had heard some Indian who was present at the wedding of Charles and Diana in St. Pauls Cathedral that - as Prince Charles was greeted during
his wedding to Diana by a Sai devotee with the words ‘Sai Ram’ which – so the
story goes – was acknowledged by HRH as he walked down the aisle! This is the
kind of (wholly unsupported) rumour that Sai devotees love to spread. There is almost no end to the
absurd claims and stories that seed and grow in the desire to elevate the one they believe to be the Divine Godhead incarnate in the public eye.
The UK newspaper Daily Express published an
unconfirmed report in 1990 that a representative of Prince Charles had written
to Sai Baba requesting that the Prince could visit Sai Baba, and that this
request had been turned down by a letter from the ashram authorities. Therefore I decided to ask my trusted friend and close associate of Sai Baba, V.K. Narasimhan, whether Prince Charles had ever visited or previously written to, Sai Baba. He immediately and definitively told me that
this had certainly never occurred. However, some years later in March 1994 (see my scanned notes of that here)
he told me that a letter had been received by SB from Prince Charles,
which SB had shown to him and asked him to answer. He was not allowed to tell
the exact contents of that letter. He wrote to Prince Charles and reminded him
of his own journalistic meeting with him in India when the Prince was but a
teenager by the sea on a fishing observation expedition (though no fish had deigned to turn up). He had later received a friendly yet rather formal note in reply, he said (as I recall it).
It is fairly well known (and was very much publicized throughout the Sai movement) that Professor Keith Crichlow, the man who designed the Hospital in Puttaparthi (partly on the lines of Buckingham Palace), was a close associate of Prince Charles, who was later made head of the Prince of Wales’ Institute of Architecture in the UK.
In 1992 at Kodaikanal, SB gave a selected group of foreign devotees the apparent great privilege of attending his evening talks with students at his residence there. VKN was also present and spoke his piece, as did a number of others. These talks and occasional singing etc. were recorded and issued by Danish devotee Erik Henriksen on 6 cassettes, which proved to contain nothing new or of any unusual significance. However, not included in the recordings was a report from a prominent SB devotee he was asked to give by SB about how Prince Charles, recently having visited Bangalore, had said that he wanted to have ‘Swami’s darshan’. The Prince had been about to give an address when he heard that this gentleman was a close follower of SB. He had allegedly taken this man aside and questioned him for about half-an-hour about SB. The Prince was said to have stated that he would visit Sai Baba if it were not for the UK Government, which was concerned about the security arrangements. This seems like a very weak reason from the UK government, for here was Prince Charles, staying at a Bangalore hotel and moving about in South India without security problems. However, that was what the select band of Western devotees, which included the US devotees Robert and Rita Bruce (who were then sharing accommodation in Kodai with Dr. J. Hislop) and other persons I knew, were allowed to hear.
Subsequently, in 1996, Robert Bruce told me that he had been present at an interview with SB where someone had asked SB about Charles and Diana and the possibility they might visit. SB had replied “They are a disgrace to their country!” These were the verbatim words Robert Bruce reported to me! One may speculate as to why SB thought this… perhaps because of the leaked phone calls between Prince Charles and Lady Parker-Bowles. This could not be applied to Diana, however, so perhaps it was just the fact of their divorce. SB is known to be generally very much against divorce, though he has sanctioned some divorces (eg. Diane Baskin’s).
On this background, it is interesting that ‘Fergie’, the Duchess of York, visited SB at his ashram (in February of either 1995 or 1996) and was directly granted two interviews by SB (being a more important person for SB than ordinary devotees?). This caused much excitement with devotees present who not only constantly craned their necks toward Fergie during darshan, but also lined up in front of her after darshan (right on the walkway Sai Baba takes when he leaves), with notebooks and pieces of paper in hand for her autograph. This excitement among followers, seemed possibly to herald the acceptance of Sai Baba by the British monarchy. This, of course never happened!
In rubbishing Prince Charles and Princess Diana before a group of Westerners, could SB have simply been jealous of their fame, or piqued because they had not rushed to his ‘lotus feet’? I hardly need point out that Princess Diana was doubtless more admired and loved and by far more people, than SB has ever been able to demonstrate in his own case! He boasts about his being "loved by everyone" and having ‘n million’ devotees, with 3 million at his 70th birthday (which is patently absurd to those who can count heads properly and estimate a maximum of 300,000). Actually, Princess Diana had hundreds of millions of admirers, and for obvious good reasons - not to mention the supremely popular and much more widely known and loved present Queen Elisabeth!