Adyar Theosophy:-Open Election - How Inconvenient - 2014 Presidential Election. Adyar Theosophical Society, Chennai, India.

The Future? of the Adyar Theosophical Society

Open Election?

How Inconvenient

For the Adyar Theosophical Society Elite

Won’t be long now but at least on Blackpool beach

you can come back tomorrow and build another one

An election for an international president is hardly in the interests of the Theosophical Society elite as it will lead to discussion which may challenge their comfortable position and the ancient ways of doing things. The election process may lead to members requesting information that raises the visibility of currently remote and inaccessible members of the General Council. Modern organisations issue bulletins and newsletters, mostly by email, to keep their members up to date and discuss issues while the Adyar Theosophical Society leadership are masters of the news blackout. It's easier for the elite just to appoint their own choice as international president and save themselves all the trouble of consulting the members and therefore avoid having anything at all to do with those whom they consider to be “BALLAST”. If the leadership decide not to bother with this presidential election, it is yet to be seen if they whether they inform the members or, in true Adyar style, let them work it out for themselves.

With a leadership time warped in the socially exclusive attitudes of the 1930s and determined to keep it that way, it is no surprise that they are incapable of communicating with members who live in 2014. The members of the elite are well known only to the other members of the elite and possibly to officials within their own national section and have never tried to improve the situation by such initiatives as circulating profiles of officials. Candidates for president are likely to spend more time making themselves known to voters than actually presenting their policies.

Lack of information has led to lack of trust and the members widely suspect, with good reason, that the leadership may cheat them out of their right to vote, and there have been no minutes yet released for the 2013 Adyar Convention to indicate anything one way or the other. The doubt over an election is therefore left to fester rather than be resolved by openly accessible information and clear statements with names of accountable and contactable people to accompany those statements.

The Burnier/Sri Ram family control of Adyar presents another “not for discussion” issue which is likely to close down any chance of democracy. The number of Burnier/Sri Ram family members employed at Adyar and their respective positions have never been revealed to the general membership. Even the issue of family appointments has been kept secret. The General Council has sat on this issue probably because of the extent to which they rely on patronage from the family. National leaderships have found the family control issue simply too difficult and any national leader who becomes international president will have to accept that they are a puppet of the controlling family. If the leadership do decide to hold this election then many members may decide that it is not worth voting.

In its current form as the sort of hereditary elitist organisation that Dorothy L Sayers readers would easily recognise, the Adyar Theosophical Society is now a doomed project. It is clearly obsolete and possibly beyond reform. Amongst national section leaderships it is currently too sensitive to openly discuss the effect that Adyar’s archaic systems and financial drain have on the levels of membership and the energy of the Society but it will only take one national section to break away on deciding that Adyar is a limiting and divisive force in Theosophy, and others will follow in a mass exodus from the Adyar fold. One of the main obstacles to change is the concern national leaderships have over the shape of a post Adyar Theosophical Movement but with two thirds of national sections not represented at the 2013 International Convention, the post Adyar movement is already effectively a reality.