Contrary to conventional wisdom and popular sentiments among their core voter base, the BJP has gone ahead and thrown their complete weight behind a fanatic, quite possibly sociopath, Catholic Missionary who used Charity as a front for her missionary work and expanding the power of her Church.
The BJP, again betraying the wishes of its core vote bank, has resolved to appease the secular brigade by sending an official government delegation, led by MEA Sushma Swaraj, to attend the canonization of Mother Teresa on the 4th of September.
Despite a pile of evidence that exposes her charity as a sham and her real motives to be religious conversion, the allegedly Hindu Nationalist government has stamped their approval on the morbid legacy of Saint Teresa.
One can understand the BJP’s unwillingness to take one of the most powerful institutions in the world by its horns, especially with the noose of anti-minority and communal tag that has been cast around its head, but the situation could have been handled more subtly and the whole charade of celebrating Teresa could have been very much avoided and even that without any particular damage to their political prospects.
Narendra Modi paying tribute to the false Messiah in his Mann ki Baat would have been more than enough, the official delegation to the canonization ceremony was a gesture which would have been prudent to avoid.
A testament to the power and influence of the Church is the manner in which it can still perpetuate a fraud that is long since due for the masses to come to terms with and celebrate a myth that it helped create and propagate in the first place and yet, the entire establishment gives them a free pass to carry on with their celebration of the life of a Sociopath and glorify a woman who refused to provide patients with a few moments of peace even on their deathbed. If a Hindu Nationalist government with the biggest public mandate in decades cannot bring itself to refrain from the fracas, it’s a bit depressing.
As we are called to celebrate the life and times of Mother Teresa, it is worth considering exactly what we are supposed to be celebrating. We are celebrating a woman who harbored dogmatic beliefs that endangered the lives of her patients.
We are celebrating a friend to dictators, an ally to con men and the face of one of the most tyrannical organizations on Earth. We are celebrating a woman who regarded suffering as means of coming closer to god and denied patients the relief they desperately sought because it was contradictory to her morbid ideology. We are celebrating a woman who used the misery of the poor to further the cause of her religion.
In an ideal world, we would despise such a woman but money spent on PR blitz goes a long way in curing the faults of a character and build an aura of piety around someone so despicable. If Che Guevara can be heralded as a harbinger of liberty and prosperity, restructuring the legacy of Mother Teresa as a saint is hardly any hard work.
The only good thing to have come out of this whole farcical ritual of canonization is that it has ensured Mother Teresa is no longer the universally acknowledged symbol of piety and piousness that we have so come to revere. Instead, she is another addition to the list of high-profile controversial characters that the Church has managed to come up with in its recent turbulent history.
As the trend #FraudTeresa trend has revealed, people in India are finally waking up to the dark side of the Saint. Facts which hitherto were stated by only the RSS or relatively unknown figures and were generally derided by the people at large have started receiving widespread acceptance. The myth of Mother Teresa has been begging to be exposed for a long long time, it’s only fitting that the voice of her critics reached peak volume on the occasion of her canonization.
For all those using her charity as an excuse for her depravity, many people working within the organization have wondered where all the money Mother Teresa received in donations disappeared. Various volunteers who had worked in her institutions have voiced their apprehensions about the use of donations the Missionaries of Charity were receiving.
According to multiple sources, the expenditure did not reflect the huge amount of money that was donated. Susan Shields (formerly Sr Virgin) says, “The money was not misused, but the largest part of it wasn’t used at all. When there was a famine in Ethiopia, many cheques arrived marked ‘for the hungry in Ethiopia’. Once I asked the sister who was in charge of accounts if I should add up all those very many cheques and send the total to Ethiopia.
The sister answered, ‘No, we don’t send money to Africa.’ But I continued to make receipts to the donors, ‘For Ethiopia’.” Numerous sources have also observed the deplorable situation of patients in her Homes and a serious lack of amenities.
Academics at the University of Montreal have observed, ‘Mother Teresa was generous with the prayers but rather miserly with her foundations’ millions when it came to humanity’s suffering.’ They also observe, ‘During numerous floods in India or following the explosion of a pesticide plant in Bhopal, she offered numerous prayers and medallions of the Virgin Mary but no direct or monetary aid.’
A lot of credit for deconstructing the hallow surrounding Mother Teresa goes to Dr. Aroup Chatterjee who has been waging a valorous battle against those seeking to perpetuate the myth for years. Aroup Chatterjee is the author of a book titled ‘Mother Teresa, the Final Verdict’ which unravels the aura of the sacred holiness that has been built around Mother Teresa.
His work also heavily influenced the documentary Hell’s Angel by Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ali which really threw the Mother Teresa debate out in the open. Hopefully, a day will come in the near future when the life’s work of Aroup Chatterjee is finally rewarded and Mother Teresa is no longer revered as a Saint and her million faults brushed under the carpet.
We can finally hope. We can also hope that one day, our Hindu Nationalist party, the BJP, will no longer glorify those who vilify Hinduism and preach that no salvation is possible except through Jesus Christ and take pride in religious conversions performed on the deathbed but that, for now, remains a distant dream.
