Dear Puranjana prabhu,
please accept my obeisances, all glories to Srila Prabhupada,
I have been thinking about writing to you for a long time, but it has been difficult because English is not my first language, and there are so many things to write that it is hard to know where to start.
I just read a book, written by a Swedish scholar. The title of the book can be translated as “The new religious movements – where did they go?” As this title suggests, the book is about 5 different movements, and the Hare Krishna movement is one of them. Since the writer writes about 5 different movements, it is not surprising that she misses a few points here and there, but the outrageous thing is that she allows Harikesa to glorify himself in a way that really twists the history.
For example, he criticizes the idea that book distributors were seen as more valuable devotees, but in fact, it was Harikesa himself who used to sit on the vyasasana and says thing like “your devotion is measured by how many books you can distribute”.
Another thing is that he claims that he was disturbed by the suffering of the children in the gurukula. Now, remember that this is the same person who ordered a lot of money to be given to the Russian mafia, and the Russian mafia was involved in the production of child pornography. So if you rape kids in front of the camera, these people will give you loads of money and call you “honorable”, but if you actually want to help the kids, they will give you as little as they can.
One thing that only gets mentioned briefly in this book is that actually, Harikesa’s deviations got serious already in 1984, and the GBC received their first reports about his errant behavior that year. Their respons was to expel all the devotees who complained about the GBC’s chosen guru, and that’s why a lot of devotees in Harikesa’s zone ended up leaving the movement around that time.
But from 1984 on, Harikesa’s status never really improved, but he just deviated more and more, with the aid of the other GBC. After he left ISKCON, he has also written that he lost faith in Prabhupada already in the mid-80es. He doesn’t say why he remained as the guru as long as he could. Thus, we see that when the other “senior devotees” praised Harikesa as “the best guru we have”, he had in fact already lost faith in the whole process.
There has also been a book published recently where one man, who grew up in the gurukula, describes the abuse that he went through there. He was in the gurukula in Sweden, and he got severely abused physically and sexually. When he became an unruly kid as a reaction to that, the ISKCON authorities sent him to the gurukula in India, where he was even more abused. The name of that book is “My Karma My Fault”.
There is also a woman in Sweden, who went to gurukula, and she is the only Swedish gurukuli, who got any money from that big Turley lawsuit, but she only got about 10000$. (Compare that with the amount of money Harikesa took when he left.) She has been writing something about her experiences, but it has been very difficult for her, because she is practically illiterate since the gurukula didn’t even manage to teach her basic reading and writing.
One of the things she mentions is that she vas forced to eat the pubic hair of her so-called guru Harikesa. This seems to have been the idea of one of the crazy followers who washed his underwear.
It also seems that many of Harikesa’s former followers have become total atheists now. You only need to look at the atheist ex-devotete website gaudiya-repercussions, and it seems that the majority of ex-devotees there are former disciples of Harikesa. Thus, the result of following “the best guru in ISKCON” is that you become an atheist.
Now, some of the people who were once fanatic followers of Harikesa have taken Radhanatha as their so-called guru. It seems that they simply have to get the worst of them all. With Radhanatha’s history, it is really scary how many people pretend that he is a guru.
I’ve also noticed that ISKCON kept selling Harikesa’s books, even years after he left the movement. Even in London, which was never part of his zone, his books were sold long after his expulsion from ISKCON.
Finally, I want to thank you for you valuable service to the devotees.
Your servant (wants to be an anonumous devotee)
More Infos: http://blogs.myspace.com/52199499#ixzz0tCckGNvZ
Harikesa’s modus operandi was the same in all the countries of his zone. To engage the senior devotees to recruit and teach new devotees and at one point instrumentalise those new devotees to push out the older devotees.
Why he did not leave already in the 80s is obvious. At that point he was fully conscious about the amount of Luxmi accumulating in the Northern European BBT. Leaving the movement and starting a career in the karmi’s world was no option since he had no completed professional education, and 10 years missing in his personal data sheet not realy an initial position for a new beginning in the material world.
So even if he felt like leaving already in the 80s, his common sense said, to accomplish a worldly career is even worse. Then there was all this huge amount of money, collected for 20 years, 6 days a week by 3500 disciples.
What he obviously did at one point, carefully planing for the best time to leave and to take the exact right amount of money to make it for the rest of his live.
Some ex-disciples mentioned that they did not believe that version that Vishva Toshani Foundation and PremaInvest were making all those millions which Harikes claimed to be his private money. For making all those millions, they would have had to pay tax in Russia, no tax computation or cash account book was ever found. Rather, Harikes might have off-shored BBT money to different accounts and this money was later turned into the receipts of his so called gambling on the Russian stock exchange.
Either way, legally Harikes could have never argued that this money was his, because the money was earned under ISKCON flag.
At one point Harikes had driven out practically all Prabhupada disciples in his zone, the few remaining were turned into gurus, and now he even started to get rid of many of his senior disciples. Several cases were reported that senior disciples, Sankirtan-leaders, TPs, were send to India, or other continents and never called back. At one point these neophyte devotees felt totally rejected and blooped.
Interesting to note, weeks before Harikes left he was sick like a dog, and as soon he was out the movement, the very next day seen as fit as a fiddle.