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India's trying hard not to be what it meant for Mother Teresa

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Shiv Visvanathan
Shiv VisvanathanSep 05, 2016 | 09:13

India's trying hard not to be what it meant for Mother Teresa

There is something beautiful about India which I am afraid we might lose.

It is our sense of hospitality as a culture. We are open not just in terms of food but to ideas.

Our syncretism is a part of our hospitality to ideas. The stranger, the guest, the visitor, the exile, the refugee is always welcome.

In fact the vision of India is openness to all creeds. One feels every form of defeated knowledge, every old fashioned idea will find a home, a niche.

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The last Victorian and the last Marxist will settle down amicably in the same neighbourhood.

Hospitality

There is, however, a problem. While Indian culture and civilisation see hospitality as a way of life, the Indian nation state and its current idea of majoritarian dominance threatens the seeds of plurality present in such a framework of attitudes.

However, one must add the even the nation state has a sense of openness to its credit.

India was open to Tibet and welcomed the Dalai Lama and was considerate to over a million refugees that streamed in after the war in the then East Pakistan.

Another testimony to the hospitality of India is the way we honour our foreign residents as distinguished Indians.

I am thinking of the pride we take in the achievements of Mother Terasa or Dalai Lama. India's pride and its sense of celebration about Teresa's canonisation is another familiar example.

Yet if one looks a bit more closely our sense of hospitality is suddenly emerging with a lot of caveats. The murder of the missionary Graham Staines over the conversion issue is one such event.

The recent attacks by the RSS and Bajrang Dal on Mother Teresa's role is another. Even here one must point out that none of these critiques are as blatant as Garret Hardin's devastating attack on Teresa's credentials.

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For the VHP and RSS, Teresa was a missionary committed as much to conversion as to charity. (Photo credit: Reuters) 

Hardin in his now almost legendary essay "Life Boat Ethics" presents a sociopolitical perspective on aid, suffering, and development.

In his rendering of this Darwinian world, where triage lets the fittest eliminate the weak, he argues that the mother's work was a waste of time.

All she did was to pick up the old, the wasted and the dying from the streets of Calcutta and provide them a temporary shelter. After a while the poor, he claimed, returned to the streets to die anonymously.

Hardin advocates a sense of triage, a process of sorting and elimination where the weak and the defenceless are eliminated.

The demographic power of the poor he claims might sink life boat earth, which should prioritise the rich and the powerful. Compared to the arrogance of such an analysis, the RSS/VHP critique of Teresa looks minor. Yet is worrying.

Objection

The objection came over a set of issues. Firstly, there was a sense of unfairness, that Narendra Modi reprimands them over the cow protection issue and then sends a delegation headed by Sushma Swaraj to attend Teresa's canonisation ritual at the Vatican.

For the VHP and RSS, Teresa was a missionary committed as much to conversion as to charity.

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Yet their objection was articulated almost in rationalist terms that canonisation was superstition that the age of miracles was over.

At a deeper level, there is a residual feeling that conversion even if it is allowed by the Constitution challenges the Hindu way of life which disallows such a possibility.

One can only be born a Hindu. One cannot convert to it then there is the whole issue of "Rice Christians" who convert to Christianity for economic opportunities.

One must admit conversion does trigger violence. The latter will not plough when they think the land is menstruating. The struggle almost becomes a battle of competing world views.

The RSS and VHP feel that Teresa's views on conversion should have been challenged more officially. Sending a delegation composed of Swaraj, Kejriwal, Francis D'souza almost becomes a tacit approval of Teresa's ideologies.

Struggle

This triggers a hornet's nest of other questions which had remained submerged before.

Firstly, many NRIs in their nostalgia for Calcutta felt she defamed the city. The other claim was that she was a relic of medievalism.

A narcissist who was attention-seeking. Such critiques are irrelevant because they show little sense of the woman and her integrity.

A more basic critique was that Teresa showed compassion but did little to improve their conditions. The poor remained desperately poor despite Teresa.

One response to this came from the Left. For the CPM and the likes of Jyoti Basu, Teresa was a piece of integrity.

She created a sense of trust, of integrity. For the Left, such concern was adequate.

Left or Hindu they owned up to her in a wonderful way. I think Mother Teresa sensed the power of Indian style of hospitality and adoption. Such an attitude we must realise was not subject to fashion.

It saw the best of her and the best in her and responded to it. In fact, our sense of Mother, added to the overall quality of Teresa.

She needed India and India's sense of her to be Teresa. This is why I feel the nitpicking, the carping, whether of some NRIs and intellectuals, is narrow-minded.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)

Last updated: September 05, 2016 | 09:13
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