Vrindavan Dasa – USA: Dear Rasaprema prabhu, I understand what you are going through in some way. Parents do bear a considerable amount of responsibility for their children’s consciousness as we ourselves are not more Krsna Conscious than perhaps we could be. The pressures to get our finances together so we can provide housing and food for our families put incredible strain on us and our families. Over the years this takes its toll, and we tend to drift more towards mundane activities as opposed to spiritual ones. This is especially so when we begin to lose faith in ISKCON as we cannot see its relevance to our devotional lives and the future of our children.
Hollywood and TV (the one-eyed Guru) is certainly a great factor in our corruption and the messages that we receive via this evil medium have assisted greatly in changing the moral fiber of both our children and ourselves, but it is not the real issue. It is like blaming video games for the Columbine shootings.
Parents do have an important role to play in a child’s development but so does the child’s school and peers, which in actual fact have a greater impact on the years when they are most impressionable, 11-17, and it is here that peer pressure causes it greatest damage. We would like to think we failed as our children don’t seem to want to listen to us and society does tend to look for blame in usor the TV, but really society plays the more important role in a person’s life than they or we would admit. After all, what is the purpose of creating a society but to serve and protect its members? Society plans out our lives in minute detail from the cradle to the grave. So we are hardly to blame for everything.
Over the years that ISKCON has been around, our leaders have failed to create a sense of a cohesive devotional community which we can all feel an intrinsic part of. They failed to produce a protective society for us to live in while we serve Krishna. They instead chose to push on with the guru based math system that values recruitment and individual projects as opposed to the community. The Sannyasi Guru’s left this up to the Institutional aspect of ISKCON, which was more interested in the corporate process as opposed to the spiritual one that Srila Prabhupada instructed us to do. Corporate process equated to power and control instead of spiritual growth and leadership.
ISKCON is fraught with so many problems and has utterly failed to create a sense of community and social responsibility, and in doing so, not only does everyone suffer but the most suffering is laid at our children’s feet. We have brought them into this world and promised them a Krsna conscious life, but we have in many instances failed to keep that promise.
The responsibility does not solely lay with us, the parents, but also the whole ISKCON society must take some responsibility for not creating a healthy environment for us and our children to live our lives in the service of Krsna. The Gurukulis who gave your dear daughter the drugs and used and misused her are well known by the local Temple Management, the Devotional Community, local Law Enforcement (for whatever it is worth in India), their parents, and most importantly the Vrindavan Gurukul. When we say the Vrindavan Gurukul, we have to look at who ran and operated that Gurukul for all these years that produced these corrupt children.
Danurdhara Swami (JBD) / Bhurijan das (JBD) / Braja Bihari das (JBD) / Sesa das (Seth Spellman (JBD?) / Gauri das (now shadow Manor TP) / Vinod Bihari das (JBD) / Anandavrindavan Mataji (Braja Bihari’s wife)
These devotees are responsible for creating a Gurukul that is bloated with filth and corruption. Yes, of course we can blame us or the boys, but who had them in their formative years? These people did, and they allowed so much child abuse to go on unchecked for all that time. You have to understand that many of the boys who are now thought of as criminals and corrupt were corrupted themselves in that Gurukul. The institutionalized child abuse and homosexual or so-called experimental sexual behavior that these boys had to go through while under the care of the above listed demons of Vrindavan was incredible.
I am sure that this is not news to you. Sure, you can blame yourself for watching TV or reading the paper or even having a beer, but while you were doing this, when your kids were growing up, some of them were being raped, beaten and molested while trapped in that Gurukul. What do you expect these boys will do when they break free of the clutches of that evil school and those so-called devotees? Become nice model citizens? Dream on!
The Vrindavan Gurukul has been responsible for corrupting most of the boys that are the leaders in the drug and sex party scene worldwide, as well as creating the greatest number of sexual predators. The victims, of course, are not only our girls but also other boys, who these corrupted Vrindavan boys needed to convert in order to recruit their mules and to buy their drugs. The Vrindavan Gurukul does create leaders, but they create leaders of corruption. Not much difference between them and our Guru’s, except maybe the resources.
We must also understand the pushers and their suppliers are all well known by the local law enforcement. The CBI and Foreigner Registration Office have intimate knowledge of exactly who these gurukulis are. The Gurukuli pushers also know this and knowingly risk the naive and ‘love struck’ girls and lusty dog boys to mule their drugs overseas. You know the story: they give drugs freely in the beginning at their well organized parties and the kids end up buying from them. They drug and have sex with the girls and they all believe Shree Vrindavan Dham is heaven on earth! The FBI and Interpol are also aware of these individuals, yet somehow or other, the ISKCON GBC intervened some five years ago and nothing has being done about it since.
This is not a sole problem of the local ISKCON Ex-Vrindavan Gurukul misfits. They have now brought in many of the local sleazy Indians. These local Indian boys parade around as if they are ex-Gurukulis, but their only intention is to get some white skin sex. Our girls think they are our ISKCON boys, but they are actually the sons of local mafia and shopkeepers. Take a look at the Gurukuli websites and you will see their faces and Indian names. These guys are sexual predators and will not give our girls a devotional life, nor are they financially able to look after our western girls, as they come from poor or criminal families. We know these boys and who their parents are. Until we educate our daughters to discriminate, they will fall victim to these infiltrators.
There are also many girls who have grown up in Vrindavan who are involved in the local drug and sex scene. Of course, these girls have been brought into the fold as innocent children by the main pushers and sexual predator Gurukulis. There was a case some years ago of a local western girl who was shot by her long-term local Indian boyfriend. She was known to be highly active on the local scene since she was a very young girl. In this instance the parents can be solely blamed for her corruption, and not Institutional ISKCON. This will continue to go on so long as we have the present system in place in Shree Vrindavan Dham.
Gopal Krishna Goswami has been aware of these issues for decades and has purposefully ignored them, to the detriment of all concerned. He needs to be made accountable for his criminal negligence more than anyone else on the local front. He never once intervened on any matter to do with the protection of children in the Gurukul in Vrindavan, even though parents and individual devotees have complained to him in great numbers for decades. In fact, he took the side of the authorities and the abusers. We all know Gopal Krishna Goswami for the person he is and it is a shame that ISKCON lets him get away with his blatant disciple harvesting business in Shree Vrindvana Dham, and elsewhere for that matter.
At this point in time, both Gopal Krishna Goswami and the Temple management (supported by the Vrindavan GBC) are hotly engaged in and spending incredible amounts of money, manpower and resources on lawsuits regarding property disputes. But you have never ever seen Gopal Krishan Goswami shed one single tear or even a rupee for the children that have been ruined by the Gurukul. Land, assets and harvesting disciples are all they are interested in and they could not give one damn about the devotional community.
Gopal Krisha Goswami has so much power and influence, yet he has never once used it to have these local gurukuli drug pushers and their suppliers slammed in Jail. Why? This is because he does not care about anyone but himself. He is so self-centered and ambitious that he cannot see the real people around him that he needs to protect and care about with the sacred position that he has taken, as if he is a big Acharya.
The so-called senior devotees of the Gurukul need to be held accountable for their failures. At present, the Gurukul is in the hands of Indians both as teachers and as students. Hardly any ISKCON or western children attend that school. But they are also at risk. They are exposed to the local scene and make contact with the local pushers. Many of these children come from families whose vegetarian and alcohol consumption status is unknown and it poses a great threat to the spiritual atmosphere of the children in Shree Vrindavan Dham. This needs to be monitored and evaluated in order to understand what impact they will have on our devotional community when they graduate from the mundane academic program that the school puts them through.
If the Gurukul cannot produce devotees of even subnormal spiritual consciousness from children of devotees, how can they possibly produce devotees from the general Indian populace?
The Gurukul is known to produce graduates of low moral character and spiritual consciousness. The Local Temple Authorities are more interested in power plays of the various Gurus in ISKCON in order to gain control of the Temple. The local GBC (VEB) is the tool of Gopal Krishna Goswami, who cares little for the devotional lives of the community, and only for power and control of this highly valuable commercial asset.
So unless we, as a movement, sort out the root causes of our problems, we can never expect to be able to produce Krishna conscious children. That is why families are leaving ISKCON in droves. Unless ISKCON takes our children’s and parent’s devotional lives and futures as being a primary objective, then we will continue to destroy families like we have become expert at doing for all these years.
So prabhu, you do have some responsibility and yes, the mundane commercial world in which we live is also a contributing factor, but the main responsibility lies with the ISKCON that Srila Prabhupada gave us, in which we were to live in his service. This corrupt institution has stolen our devotional futures away from us and our children and they must be made accountable.
The last letter by Achyuta prabhu laid out some very important questions that the GBC and Gurus need to answer and that we as a community must seriously attend to in order to correct this untenable situation that we find ourselves in.
Vrindavan Das
