Mother Teresa was as secular as Mohan Bhagwat
How often you see the Hindu fringe invoking Christopher Hitchens? Secularists siding with a Catholic saint who never pretended to be secular? How often you see India’s assertive right-wingers standing up with a self-proclaimed "non-theist", as Hitchens would famously call himself, while the progressives are lining up to defend Mother Teresa for who abortion was “the worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace”?
Till the other day, the Hindu fanatics would do a Mother Teresa on their women by exhorting them to have ten children, and the besieged liberals would be rightly abhorred by the idea of women being turned into a baby-producing machine. But vindicating the Orwellian order that pervades in the country, the so-called secular and the sacred have switched sides - the secular liberals are now busy defending the Mother who unabashedly asked the people of Ireland in 1992, to “never allow in this country a single abortion”. Ironically, the same people, a couple of years ago, were on the streets after the death of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland. She died as she failed to get an abortion after suffering a miscarriage, primarily because “Ireland was a Catholic country” - much on the lines of what Mother Teresa wanted.
The problem - or should we say contradiction? - is deeply engrained in the Indian psyche. There are perceptibly two different standards in practice - one for Hindus, and the other for the rest. The RSS, the VHP and the BJP are regularly branded as communal in the political parlance, but the same isn’t the case with the Muslim League in Kerala, the All India United Democratic Front in Assam and the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh. In reality, however, they are the two sides of the same coin. Similarly, how can the agenda of the RSS be different from that of the Missionaries of Charity? Whether we like it or not, the RSS runs a number of charitable organisations and schools among tribals to forward the Hindu cause; Mother Teresa had done the same for the Christian!
No one questions Mother Teresa’s commitment for the poor. But to see it through a secular prism, as many of us are doing in India after the comments of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, would be wrong. The Mother’s mission was less concerned with the elimination of poverty among the poor; it was rather aimed at providing salvation in the afterlife. “I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people,” she would say, adding: “You are suffering like Christ on the Cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.” No doubt she loved the poor, but sadly she would also glorify the poverty. It’s this mindset which explains why Mother Teresa failed to build any world-class hospital in Kolkata despite so much of money flowing in to her organisation.
The fact is that Mother Teresa did social service because she was a missionary, and not despite this. Nothing explains this better than her call to thousands of pregnant Bangladeshi women, raped by Pakistani soldiers during the 1971 liberation war, to have their babies. Even at a time when one of the worst humanitarian tragedies was unfolding, she thought like a diehard Catholic, rather than a conscientious social worker. Writes Australian author Germaine Greer, a Roman catholic herself, in one of her journals: “When she [Mother] went to Dacca two days after its liberation from the Pakistanis in 1972, 3,000 naked women had been found in the army bunkers. Their saris had been taken away so that they would not hang themselves. The pregnant ones needed abortions. Mother Teresa offered them no option but to bear the offspring of hate.”
When asked how the poor would look after so many kids in the family, the Mother said quite fervently, “I do not agree because God always provides. He provides for the flowers and the birds, for everything in the world that He has created. And those little children are His life. There can never be enough.”
But then why blame Mother Teresa? She, after all, never claimed to be secular. She never pretended, as Hitchens writes in his essay, The Missionary Position, “That her work is anything but a fundamentalist religious campaign”. For her, the poorest of the poor were the instruments of this, “an occasion for piety”. It’s we, the so-called secular, liberal brigade, who put the secular halo around the Mother. Maybe out of our preconceived biases! Maybe because of our guilt for not doing enough for our poor! Whatever be the reason, the end result is the travesty of truth and history.