The Hridayananda/Brahmatirtha Coterie: Leadership Scandals, "Mental Illness" & Hypocrisy
BY: LALITA MADHAVA DEVI DASI
Nov 13, BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT, USA (SUN) — In his article, The Consequence of Leadership Scandals", Joe Muniandy quotes the scholar Anson Shupe regarding a "five-step inductive process of disillusionment with religious leadership."
An excerpt from Step 2 states: "A mounting set of disquieting events...challenges the sacred social reality. Some leaders are accused of base improprieties, others of permitting the “secondary deviance” to continue by essentially looking the other way instead of whistleblowing."
Let me just say that I found all five steps to be completely applicable to ISKCON and to the entire GBC and volumes could be written on this topic. But, for the extremely specific aspects of the Hridayananda issue that I have recently been addressing (namely the Devamrta scandal, the istagosthi alert and the repeated false labeling of people as "having a history of mental illness"), I would just like to examine one way out of the many in which this "inductive process of disillusionment" unavoidably applies to Brahmatirtha.
Brahmatirtha is universally regarded as Hridayananda's closest associate, confidante and advisor, and they are in close communication on a day-to-day basis.
Some years ago Brahmatirtha's wife told me that he had begun taking prescription pharmaceutical medication to treat what she referred to as a "chemical imbalance", which had been diagnosed as being the cause of his erratic mood swings and his then-legendary explosive, abusive behavior toward the devotees.
Certainly there is no shame in this and I know a number of devotees who take anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds. And the meds certainly appear to have worked because he has been a changed man ever since.
But here's the problem I have: Hridayananda doesn't sneeze without consulting Brahmatirtha. (I guarantee you that Hridayananda was on the phone with him the minute Aniruddha's letter was published.) Therefore, even if Brahmatirtha was not himself the architect of the damage control and did not himself personally strategize the release of the "Be Aware" istagosthi alert that went out to all of Hridayananda's disciples (though he likely was/did both of those things), he would have at the very least had to have been aware of it. And in this alert, as well as in Malati Manjari's statement about Aniruddha, we find someone being stigmatized and discredited as being "mentally ill," and their experiences invalidated on that basis, because of a bout with depression.
So, what I want to know is, how could Brahmatirtha in good conscience have actively or even passively participated in such a disgraceful thing when he himself was and may even still be on medication for the same or a similar disorder?
In the bad old days, Brahmatirtha used to make very free with his despicable, politically-motivated false labeling of people as being "crazy" ("having a history of mental illness" is the new, more sophisticated way of saying "crazy"), and in doing so he caused people incalculable amounts of distress, suffering and anguish. But one would have expected that he would have stopped doing that to people (doing it himself as well as standing by as an enabler and veritable accomplice while Hridayananda does it, which makes him guilty by association) once he got his own psychiatric diagnosis and had to go on medication for it.
So, never mind the lofty "disillusionment with religious leadership" that Shupe describes (because any faith in their "religious leadership" was lost long ago), I am disillusioned with both of them as human beings. This single manifestation of glaring hypocrisy and underhanded politicking speaks volumes about their character and suggests that neither of them has any decency or any integrity whatsoever.
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While I am focusing on Hridayananda's istagosthi alert (and analyzing it in minute detail with regard to its multifarious implications, which expand outward in a ripple effect) as a general matter of principle, the alert also struck a nerve for me on a personal level.
Back in 1990, I wrote a personal letter to another ISKCON leader (I believe it was Ravindra Svarupa, the sell-out "reformer") documenting Hridayananda's many abuses of his Zonal Acarya position in Florida. Somehow the letter got "leaked" and made its way into the hands of Nityananda dasa (Nico Kuyt), who then published it in the Vedic Village Review. When my letter, which spoke nothing but the truth, was published, Brahmatirtha went on an absolute hysterical rampage against me (this was before he got on medication). He went to the President of the Alachua temple, told him I was "crazy" and an "aparadhi," and tried to have me banned from the temple. Brahmatirtha tried to have me banned from Krishna's temple. (How evil is it to try, via underhanded political maneuvering, to prevent another Vaishnava from attending kirtana and seeing the Deities? And by extension, my little daughter would have also been kept from the temple if I had been.) When that didn't work (because the older devotees were onto Hridayananda by that time), Brahmatirtha went to my new husband, who was a Hridayananda disciple, and told him I was crazy and tried to turn him against me and break up my marriage!
For the record, I have no "history of mental illness" and have never even been afflicted with so much as garden variety depression or any other disorder. But this horrible little man tried to destroy my life on the grounds that I was "crazy" just because I spoke out against Hridayananda's wrongdoing.
I did go on to patch things up with Hridayananda and Brahmatirtha over the years and became friendly with them both, and I would have been willing to forgive and forget these past misdeeds (even though neither one of them has ever had the integrity to apologize for these things) if they had just stopped engaging in these types of disgraceful activities. But the istagosthi alert was proof positive in black and white that they are both still at it: still trying to brush the Devamrta debacle under the rug, still lying and still attempting to manipulate people (followers who trust them as spiritual leaders), polarize them and come between their relationships with others. (Certainly none of those followers would ever want to associate with Aniruddha after being told that he is "mentally ill" and is "writing all sorts of false, nasty things.")
And these little young devotees (and old ones like Candrabhanu) who are so quick to rush to Howard's defense (and say horrible things about people they don't even know) would be wise to take heed of the experiences of those who've gone before them, lest they one day find themselves on the receiving end of their so-called "guru" and his underhanded "advisor's" despicable behavior.
