Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity need no introduction. This piece is not about what she, or they, did or did not do. It is about the Indian Right Wing’s response to her around the time of her canonisation two weeks ago.

This can broadly be divided into three categories.

Why only Mother Teresa? 

First, the old-fashioned conservative response. Conservatism favours tradition and opposes radical social change. Some conservatives seek changes that are tantamount to returning to how things were at an earlier time.

A conservative wouldn’t have a problem with Mother Teresa’s religiosity prima facie. This is evidenced by a well-known hour-long debate between Christopher Hitchens and Bill Donohue from 2000. The debate was on whether the American cultural elite was hostile to religion in general, and Catholicism in particular. Hitchens was against the motion and everything Teresa stood for, naturally. Donohue supported both.

Going by the definition we began with, a Hindu conservative shouldn’t have a problem with Mother Teresa either. Unless, that is, one were to view her work in the context of having the effect of eroding Hindu religiosity — one consequence of which would be conversions, as Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat suggested in February last year, and as the Organiser backed with articles like this one.

This had sparked off last season’s Mother Teresa debates, the most interesting of which for me was this one on Times Now, because in the middle of it, Rahul Easwar – while arguing that Mother Teresa too should be open to questioning – screamed nevertheless: “We are not like Hitchens!”

This season, we have had pieces by Swapan Dasgupta (in The Pioneer and The Free Press Journal) and Kanchan Gupta (in The Pioneer and Rediff). Neither piece mentions conversions. Both pieces, in tenor, seem to approve of Teresa and her work while rubbishing attempts to secularise her. The key underlying argument seems to be: Good social work fuelled by religiosity is fine, but similar Hindu figures should be commended and backed as well. Fair enough.

Can Mother Teresa get you uninvited from weddings?

The second response is a nativism and national conservatism of sorts, infused with subalternism, examples of which can be found in Swarajya’s webinar with Aroup Chatterjee, the London-based physician who has written Mother Teresa: The Untold Story.

It began with Abhinav Agarwal reading out Aroup Chatterjee’s words, about how Indians have, apparently, been enthralled by Mother Teresa because of their “pusillanimity before the white man”. Towards the end, Agarwal and Chatterjee (the latter joining on a webcam from London) discussed the “poverty tourism” that Chatterjee sees being spawned by Mother Teresa’s reputation. Chatterjee castigated her and Indians and their governments for not having fought back at Kolkata being given the ironic sobriquet of “City of Joy”.

Chatterjee listed out a series of allegations against Teresa (some discussed later) and recommendations for India and often tipped over into hyperbole. For instance:

“Any country with self-respect should stop other people from coming in and dishing out good work. If they’re an international charity with reputation in areas like disaster [relief]… they can come in for short periods of time. But the days of a white person coming in with a big robe and these little black people milling around them, the days of that is over.”

The root question of whether the reason for this might have been the need for this work, whether by a white person in a big robe or anyone else, is not discussed.

Chatterjee cited, as an example of the hardships he’d faced for publishing his views, not being invited to weddings by his extended family. The reason? Apparently, his relatives’ children would “get expelled from convent schools”.

This apocalyptic vision of Kolkata goes hand in hand with Chatterjee’s recent piece on Teresa in The Economic Times, in which he alluded to the city being a place where, “Even after her death, the Indian fear of blue-bordered saris continues.”

Since personal experiences count as testimony, some quick disclosures. I went to a “convent school” a few minutes’ walk from the Missionaries of Charity and when I try to remember those days, the fear of blue-bordered saris is conspicuous by its absence. If we were caught speaking disrespectfully of Christian figures, no one really said anything. A reprimand, in rare situations (more for talking in class or talking back to a teacher than for the substance of what one said). Detention was unlikely, being expelled for a relative taking up against Mother Teresa: a far cry.

Disclosure two: I happen to have relatives, and those of you who do as well – in Kolkata or, indeed, anywhere – might agree that they’re an unpredictable lot who don’t invite other relatives to weddings for a gamut of reasons. Criticising a Catholic missionary, however revered, may be the least of them.

Truth is, Chatterjee’s overstated and sweeping view of Indians in general and Calcuttans in particular as a fearful and stupid constant is much more guilty of colonial bias than those he targets with his diatribe.

As Ashok Malik writes in The Asian Age, not only would it be ridiculous to blame the diminishing of Kolkata’s reputation on MT, one could argue that her state funeral actually provided India with a diplomatic opportunity in a way.

Marxist historian and intellectual Vijay Prashad was somewhat more equanimous in 1997, when he wrote of the media’s portrayal of Mother Teresa as a saint “sent by providence to tend to the otherwise forgotten peoples of India” (“not entirely outside the self-presentation offered by Mother Teresa”). “Despite herself,” Prashad wrote in his critical essay Mother Teresa as the Mirror of Bourgeois Guilt, published in the year of her death, “Mother Teresa is the quintessential image of the white woman in the colonies, working to save the dark bodies from their own temptations and failures.” (Prashad has been cited in the translated version of a Loksatta editorial against Mother Teresa recently carried by OpIndia.com, a website self-professedly “free of the burden of liberal bias”.)

Prashad, like Hitchens – both Marxists – have critiqued Mother Teresa on a host of other issues. Some of these have been dissected through a Left lens, an analysis which the Right Wing, for obvious reasons, cannot identify with.

A selective liberalism

Where the Indian Right does find common ground with Hitchens, however, makes up a section of the third response some voices have had to the canonisation: selective liberalism.

For this, refer back to the Swarajya Webinar, and you will find that the foundation of some of Chatterjee’s arguments, as indeed the arguments of Hitchens or other researchers on the subject, rest on the twin planks of transparency and accountability.

Serious allegations include:

1. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in the Vatican bank, including money received from dictators like Jean-Claude Duvalier, Enver Hoxha and someone like Charles Keating, who was later arrested for a savings and loan scandal— all of whom Mother Teresa endorsed.
2. The poor condition of Missionaries of Charity homes and the lack of adequate medical care, despite these funds.
3. Statements by Teresa against abortion and family planning.

Prominent Right Wing voices, such Ram Vaidya and S Gurumurthy, seem to have backed such assertions by Hitchens and Chatterjee on Twitter. What this section of the Right seems to be saying can seem encouraging: A socio-religious organisation or figure cannot be a holy cow. Questions can be asked of their position on issues and affiliations. Probes into their funds and operations can be undertaken.

In the Swarajya webinar, when Agarwal asks Chatterjee if he intends to look deeper into the accounts of the Missionaries of Charity, here’s what transpires:

Chatterjee: I’m not an accounts type person. I’m a more abstract type person. Why don’t one of you take that up? 

Agarwal: I think we have a fair number of social media warriors. I hope one of them or more than one of them take that up.

Can they?

Observe how, in the second half of this Mother Teresa TV debate from last season, the same people who were pushing for an enquiry into the funds of the Missionaries of Charity, dithered the moment they were asked whether they would be in favour of a similar probe into the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

But that won’t do, will it?

Everything must be probed equally. Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian…every socio-religious organisation. Their accounts and operations must be made transparent, opened to enquiry on demand. Their leaders must be questioned on politically-incorrect statements (while on family planning, here’s remembering Sakshi Maharaj). Dealings with questionable figures should be exposed and forbidden in the future.

Going by the same standards one applies for Mother Teresa, these would include figures like Asaram Bapu, Pragya Sadhvi Thakur and Dhananjay Desai, who have been arrested on charges like terrorism and rape. What about the religious organisations who agitated in their favour this July? If a union minister travelling to the Vatican for the canonisation of a Catholic nun is objected to, surely a Jain monk addressing a state assembly cannot be okay?

So, is the Indian Right ready to embrace the big liberal moment it has spawned? Will “liberal”, “centre-right” “social media warriors” summoned at the end of webinars also probe into these institutions and religious figures?

“There’s something that’s strangely wrong with Indians,” Chatterjee says towards the end of the webinar, referring to the way the country sees Mother Teresa. “I’ve given up.” Sigh. Alas.