Let's Not Use the Philosophy of Half a Hen
BY: VISHNUGADA DASA
Jun 16, PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, USA (SUN) — We all want an ISKCON where transparency and fairness are the rule, not the exception. I congratulate the GBC for seeing the necessity for the creation of an independent CPO review board. In fact, it was part of our original proposal. But prabhus, both you and I know why the CPO has to be reviewed. The CPO has made some serious blunders and therefore a review board is needed. The GBC accepted the necessity for CPO review, but apparently didn’t want to deal with the errors the CPO has made.
You all know the story of half a hen. That’s what we now have. We have a review board without recognition of the blunders that made that board necessary. We advocated taking a hard look at the mistakes, which live out their existence in past verdicts. Keep the cases closed, and the mistakes will remain hidden and the victims of bad CPO decisions will continue to suffer. "Those who don’t know (or ignore) history are destined to repeat it."
We know it will be messy for the GBC to admit CPO mistakes. Yet, the GBC and CPO have taken the stance there have been no wrong verdicts. To this date have any appeals of CPO cases ever been overturned? One problem with this stance is that the errors are obvious to most of us. Please don’t expect us to blindly accept faulty CPO decisions for the sake of “loyalty.” That is not healthy. We therefore carefully detailed a number of CPO mistakes. These are not isolated incidents and our concern is not just an academic exercise. Since our posts, we have been contacted by devotees around the world with amazingly similar experiences of feeling beaten and abandoned by their spiritual family due to CPO decisions.
The international GBC had the courage to take the first step by creating an independent review board. Now we are asking them to have the courage to take the next step: admit some mistakes were made and take appropriate action to redress them. After all, if you make a mess, shouldn’t you clean it up? Demanding actual fairness is not being soft on child abuse. For Srila Prabhupada’s sake we should work together to do the right thing for those devotees where clear CPO errors have led to false convictions.
