Seeks to Debunk Organized Religion, Miracles : Vocal Minority Targets India’s Holy Men

Chingali Saaji rolled up his trousers and walked barefoot across a bed of glowing embers to prove his lack of faith. “No God!” he shouted.

Saaji was taking part in a firewalking demonstration put on by the Indian Rationalist Assn.

India is known the world around for its gurus, saints and swamis. Naked sadhus (Hindu holy men) wander the streets of India’s cities. Saffron-robed religious ascetics ride free on Indian railroads, a practice that Rudyard Kipling described in his classic adventure book “Kim.”

Many prominent businessmen and government ministers will not make a decision until they have consulted their personal astrologer or palmist. The late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had her own yogi and spiritual adviser, a tall, bearded, bare-chested holy man named Dhirendra Brahmachari.

Co-owned Gun Factory

Brahmachari’s light dimmed a bit in the Gandhi household after it was learned, in 1982, that he owned a half-interest in a gun factory in Kashmir. Still, he was given a place of prominence at the Hindu cremation ceremony for Indira Gandhi after her assassination last October.

India has 740 million people, about 80% of whom are devout Hindus who pay homage (and money) to numerous godly incarnations and miracle men. Even most of the minority religious communities of Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis (Zoroastrians), Jains and Sufi Muslims have living saints.

“There are many self-styled bhagwans (gods), swamis (lords), rishis (sages), maharishis (great sages), acharyas (teachers) and sants (saints) and gurus with large followings,” Khushwant Singh wrote in a book on holy men. “It is not possible to make an estimate of their numbers because widely exaggerated claims are made by each one of them.”

Engaged in an often-lonely battle against this rampant religiosity is the Indian Rationalist Assn., a small (10,000 members) organization of atheists, doubters and skeptics who seek to debunk organized religion and disprove all miracles.

Active and Noisy

Despite their small numbers, the Rationalists are an active and noisy group. Their ranks include scientists and educators. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, said he was a Rationalist.

Teams of young Rationalist missionaries are sent into the countryside on crusades against religious fakery and shamanism--”fakes, frauds and phonies,” Sanal Edamaruku, general secretary of the association, said. “We are challenging all the gurus and godmen.”

Organized at the turn of the century as part of the worldwide Rationalist movement, the Indian organization has developed its own methods of combating religious faith. Whenever they hear of a new miracle worker, the Rationalists set out to find a scientific explanation for what he has done.

One popular act of debunking performed by the Rationalists is the firewalk. Throughout India, holy men seek to demonstrate their special powers by walking barefoot across glowing embers. In the last several years the Rationalists have taken to putting on their own firewalks. One such demonstration took place in a flower bed at the Delhi Press Club.

Challenge Issued

A large fire was built while the Rationalist leader Edamaruku issued a challenge to Indian holy men to perform under “fraud-proof conditions” any one of 22 miracles listed by the association. The Rationalists, he said, would pay any holy man 100,000 rupees ($9,000) if among other things he could read the serial number of a hidden bank note, move or bend a solid object using psychokinetic power, walk on water, make an amputated limb grow even one inch “by prayer, spiritual powers, Lourdes water, holy ash, blessing, etc.”

After the flames subsided in the flower bed, the embers were raked into a trench about eight feet long. Two Rationalists, Saaji and another man, then walked over them, several times for the benefit of photographers.

“See, it is no miracle,” Edamaruku said. “Anyone can do it if they have confidence and walk fast. There is not long enough contact with the coals to burn the feet.”

Nevertheless, the demonstration managed to confuse some of the witnesses. Despite reassurances from the firewalkers that their feet were undamaged, an Indian journalist angrily described the event as “media sadism.”

Not Always Easy

A Soviet journalist said he thought that Saaji had shouted not “No God!” but “Oh, God!”

The Rationalists’ campaign against religious fraud is not always easy. In order to disprove the miraculous powers of a Buddhist holy man who said his powers permitted him to break whole coconuts on his forehead, the Rationalists had to try it themselves in order to learn how it was done.

“He was using tender young coconuts,” Edamaruku said. “After we learned his trick, even young boys--15 years old--were breaking coconuts on their heads.”

The Rationalists have taught thousands of persons to produce sacred ash from their hands, a favorite practice of the most famous living Indian guru, Sri Sathya Sai Baba. (One keeps a compact ball of ash between the thumb and forefinger, and at the proper moment raises the hands and crushes the ball.)

Delight in Lawsuit

The Rationalists, who are just as evangelical in their non-belief as any missionary, took great delight in a lawsuit filed recently in Washington by seven former devotees of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian holy man who became famous as guru to the Beatles. The seven, six men and a woman, sued the guru for $9 million, charging that he had failed to teach them to “levitate and read minds” as he had promised.

Such a lawsuit would not get far in India, where it is the Rationalists, not the holy men, who are looked upon as being out of step with society. A leading Indian Rationalist, Sanal Edamaruku’s father, Joseph, was jailed, tortured and accused of being a Communist after he published a book in the state of Kerala attacking the Bible and Christianity.

The elder Edamaruku came from a Catholic area of Kerala and was training for the priesthood when he lost his faith. He is the author of 70 books that express his opposition to religion. An Indian magazine called him the “notorious atheist guru.”

The two Edamarukus contend that many of India’s problems stem from communal hatreds. “Every year, thousands of Indians are killed in communal riots,” the father said. “The wounds created by the separation of the nation in 1947 (into largely Hindu India and largely Muslim Pakistan) are yet to heal.”

Religious Disputes

Religious disputes are indeed at the heart of most of the country’s most difficult problems--the Sikh separatist movement in Punjab, the Baptist Christian insurrection in Nagaland, and Hindu-Muslim rioting in Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Bombay.

The roots of India’s religion and superstition go deep. Almost every day, Indian newspapers feature reports of new “miracles,” such as one in the village of Massodpur just outside Delhi.

A child was born to a poor family of the village. It died four hours later but the midwife reported that before death the baby assumed the meditation position of a holy man. Soon the story had spread that the infant had been walking and talking. Pilgrims came to take darshan , or blessing, from the body. Donations were deposited at the feet of the body.

A local labor foreman sat in vigil in front of the child--until a police officer found that some of the donations had found their way into his shirt pocket.