stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

54 STRIPPING THE GURUS
[After Prabhupada’s death] the Hare Krishna movement degenerated
into a number of competing [so-called] cults that
have known murder, the abuse of women and children, drug
dealing, and swindles that would impress a Mafia don (Hubner
and Gruson, 1990).
The movement’s [post-Prabhupada] leadership was first
forced to confront the victims of abuse at a meeting in May
1996, when a panel of ten former Krishna pupils testified
that they had been regularly beaten and caned at school, denied
medical care and sexually molested and raped homosexually
at knife point (Goodstein, 1998).
Or, as Hubner and Gruson (1990) alleged:
[B]oys were ordered to come to the front of the class and sit
on [their teacher] Sri Galima’s lap. Sri Galima then anally
raped them, right in front of the class. Other boys were ordered
to stay after class. Sri Galima tied their hands to their
desks with duct tape and then assaulted them in the same
way.
At night, Fredrick DeFrancisco, Sri Galima’s assistant,
crept into the boys’ sleeping bags and performed oral sex on
them.
George Harrison was of course stabbed in his London home at
the end of 1999 by a man who believed that the Beatles were
“witches.” Interestingly, one of the reasons given by his attacker
for continuing that attempt at murder was that Harrison kept
chanting the protective mantra, “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna”—
interpreted by his disturbed assailant as a curse from Satan.
In any case, returning to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s mission:
The number of people practicing TM grew nearly exponentially
from 1967 through 1974. By 1975 there were more than half a million
people in America who had learned the technique, over a million
worldwide, and the Maharishi had been featured on the cover
of Time magazine. Were that exponential growth to have continued,
the entire United States would have been doing TM by 1979.
As it stands, with the law of diminishing returns and otherwise,
there are currently four million practitioners of Transcendental
Meditation worldwide.
In 1973, Maharishi International University (MIU) was established
in Santa Barbara, California, moving a year later to its per-