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Within a year of us leaving the ashram, Swami Premananda would be arrested and charged with the terrible crimes of rape and murder. This was shocking. We were fortunate enough to know people who had lived and worked with Swami Premananda for many years and who assured us he was innocent of all charges. Nonetheless, we had to contemplate the possibility that we had been somehow misled.
Within days of the rapidly developing situation, due to our contacts in India, we had an insight into how corrupt the proceedings against him were. It became clear a crime had been committed, but not by Swami Premananda. We went through the awful heart-rending process of watching an innocent man being swallowed by corruption on every level. The media voraciously ran with the story, heaping one lie on top of another. The police rolled in and abducted people from the ashram after the salacious media circus set the ball rolling downhill. Downhill it went, faster and faster through the gutter, until the police, through intimidation and direct violence, coerced devotees into making statements against Swami. The media ran faster with more stories in a frenzy, a dog chasing its own tail and sniffing its own arse. The judiciary cherry-picked what to allow as admissible, ignored expert testimony, and allowed the statements obtained through threats and violence from children isolated from their parents to stand. In this shameful way, Swami Premananda, a good man, was convicted.
Did I want to believe Swami Premananda was innocent? Well, of course, I did. But had the evidence proved him guilty, I would have accepted it. The experience I had at the ashram when the illusion of ‘me’ was broken and stripped away to reveal something sacred was mine alone, and nothing could take it away. The knowledge revealed was impersonal, existing as it did before ‘Paul’ ever was a thing. It did not depend on ‘me’ to be valid, and so it certainly did not depend on Swami. It just was what it was.
Had Swami been guilty, it would have meant that I was wrong in my judgement of him in the same way that one can take a wrong turn but still end up at the right destination.
The thing is, Swami was and is innocent of the charges. Read the testimonies I’ve provided and judge for yourself.