I Feel I Am On The Hit LIst — A Police Officer Replies To Sh. Riberio
J.P.Sharma
I.P.S.(Retd)
I must confess my deep distress after having read Shri Ribeiro’s emotional outburst in the New Indian Express. Till recently I had been among the very large majority of his admirers among serving and retired IPS officers . However in the quoted article Shri Rebeiro reveals himself as a hypersensitive fanatic Christian with a somewhat oversize ego, who seems to believe that (1) the Christians in India are entirely guiltless of any wrong doing (past or present); (2) that conversions to Christianity in India have been purely voluntary (without any inducement etc); (3) that those who criticize Christian saints like Mother Teresa are really putting him and his community on the Hit List;(4) that it was only after the BJP Government assumed office at the centre that the systematic targeting of the Christian Community began; that Ghar Wapasi, declaration of Christmas Day as Good Governance day and the attacks on Christian churches and schools in Delhi, all have caused the Christian Community to feel to be in a state of siege.
Shri Rebeiro also claims descent from the group which came to Goa with sage Parasuram, having the same DNA and possibly common ancestry with Shri Mohan Bhagwat/Manohar Parrikar but he (in spite of his learning) feigns ignorance about the reasons his ancestors got converted to Christianity. Yet he feels alienated by the words of those who speak of Hindu Rashtra.
This post would become too long if I deal with all the points raised by Shri Rebeiro. I will therefore presently confine myself to commenting on the prime reason for Shri Rebeiro’s believing that he has been put on the Hit list viz. the criticism of the Christian saint Mother Teresa by Mohan Bhagwat and Meenakshi Lekhi.
Mother Teresa, a staunch Roman Catholic, had started the congregation that came to be known as the Missionaries of Charity after receiving Vatican’s permission towards the end of 1950.In MT’s own words its mission was to care for, “the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone.”
Mother Teresa’s rise to Indian and international fame was rather fast. Her work was appreciated by the Indian government almost from the beginning. In 1962 she was awarded Padma Shri by Govt of India and also received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding in the same year. She received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1979 and the Bharat Ratna in 1980 besides various other awards from US,UK and Australian Governments and civilian organizations.
By 1970 itself Mother Teresa had become an international celebrity. The powerful Roman Catholic media played no small role in building up her image .A 1969 documentary Something Beautiful for God, filmed by Malcolm Muggeridge and a 1971 book of the same title by the same author were important milestones in the MT build up. The strong presence of the Christian media in India not only contributed to the glorification of Mother Teresa but also in denying audience to her critics.
Mohan Bhagwat is not the first or the only critic of Mother Teresa. In fact what he said about MT looks very mild compared to what MT’s critics—British American, and Canadian have been saying about her for almost two decades by now. The major accusations against Mother Teresa may be summarized as under;
(1) In spite of having plenty of money, Mother Teresa was not interested in providing proper medical care to the inmates of her hospices. Because of her peculiar religious beliefs she seemed to delight in the suffering of the wretches who landed in her hospices.
(2) Mother Teresa felt no compunction in accepting big donations from notorious swindlers and in fact praised some of them.
(3) That she encouraged her nuns to baptize those who were dying without their knowledge.
Abundant evidence in support of these charges is available in the public domain, some of which is given below.
In 1995 two UK based journalists Christopher Hitchens and Tarik Ali produced a highly critical documentary Hell’s Angel based on the work of Aroup Chatterjee an Indian-born doctor living in Britain, who had briefly worked in one of Mother Teresa’s Kolkata homes. The next year, Hitchens published The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, a pamphlet which repeated many of the allegations contained in the documentary. Chatterjee himself published The Final Verdict in 2003,on the same subject. Chatterjee stated that the public image of Mother Teresa as a “helper of the poor” was misleading, and that only a few hundred people are served by even the largest of the homes. Chatterjee alleged that many operations of the order engage in no charitable activity at all but instead use their funds for missionary work. He stated, for example, that none of the eight facilities that the Missionaries of Charity run in Papua New Guinea have any residents in them, being purely for the purpose of converting local people to Catholicism.
In an article captioned”Mommie Dearest” published in the web magazine ‘Slate’ dated 20 Oct 2003 Hitchens had this to say on Mother Teresa “ she was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions”. Christopher Hitchens went on to describe Mother Teresa’s organization as a cult which promoted suffering and did not help those in need. Around 2003-2005 articles critical of Mother Teresa were published in many UK and US newspapers and web magazines
At a 1981 press conference in which she was asked: “Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?” Mother Teresa reportedly replied: “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.”[2]:11[7]
Canadian scholars Serge Larivée and Genevieve Chenard of University of Montreal’s Department of Psychoeducation and Carole Sénéchal of the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Education who carried out an analysis of the available documents on the subject concluded that Mother Teresa’s hallowed image, which does not stand up to analysis of the facts—was constructed, and that her beatification was orchestrated by an effective media relations campaign.
LACK OF CARE FOR THE DYING
Among other critics, mention may be made of Dr. Robin Fox, editor of the medical journal *The Lancet*, who after visiting Mother Teresa’s operation in Calcutta in 1994 reported that he was very “disturbed” by what he saw. “There was little anesthesia to be seen and a near total neglect of medically sound diagnosis”
Mary Loudon, a volunteer in Calcutta, had even worse things to say about Mother Teresa’s operation. She reported seeing in the Home for the Dying more than a hundred men and women all dying and not been given much medical care. Pain killers used did not go beyond aspirins. The nuns were rinsing the needles used for drips with plain tap water. When Loudon asked
them why they were not sterilizing the needles, the reply was simply they had no time and that there was “no point”. She also recounted the case of a fifteen year old boy who was dying because of a treatable kidney complaint. All that was needed was a *cab fare* to take the boy to a proper hospital. But Mother Teresa’s peons refused to do so, for “if they do it for
one, they had to do it for everybody.”[22]
<http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/mission.html?200929#22
Susan Sheilds, who worked for almost ten years as a member of Mother
Teresa’s order, subsequently left the movement because of the *atrocious
negligence* she witnessed there. The order’s obsession with poverty means
that the nuns and volunteers work under conditions of austerity, rigidity
and harshness. Ms. Sheilds reported that due to Mother Teresa’s fame, the
charity had around US$50 *million* in their bank account in the US. The
donations kept pouring in, yet little of these were used to procure medicine
or to provide better health care for the suffering. The nuns were rarely
allowed to spend money on the poor they are trying to help.
[23]<http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/mission.html?200929#23>
SECRET CONVERSIONS TO CHRISTIANITY
“To Mother Teresa, like all other missionaries, spiritual well being
over-rides everything else. As Ms. Sheilds reported, “Mother Teresa taught
her nuns how to secretly baptize those who were dying. Sisters were to ask
each person in danger of death if he wanted a ‘ticket to heaven’. An
affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. The sister was then to
pretend she was just cooling the person’s forehead with a wet cloth, while
in fact she was baptizing him, saying quietly the necessary words. Secrecy
was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa’s
sisters were baptising Hindus and Muslims” [24]<http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/mission.html?200929#24
“In a speech at the Scripps Clinic in California in January 1992, Mother Teresa said: “Something very beautiful… not one has died without receiving the special ticket for St. Peter, as we call it. We call baptism ticket for St. Peter. We ask the person, do you want a blessing by which your sins will be forgiven and you receive God? They have never refused. So 29,000 have died in that one house [in Kalighat] from the time we began in 1952.”(Wikipaedia)
DONATIONS FROM SHADY CHARACTERS
In 1981, Teresa flew to Haiti to accept the Legion d’Honneur from the right-wing dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, who, after his ouster, was found to have stolen millions of dollars from the impoverished country. There she said that the Duvaliers “loved their poor”, and that “their love was reciprocated”.
She accepted money from the British publisher Robert Maxwell, who, as was later revealed, embezzled UK£450 million from his employees’ pension funds.. Teresa also pleaded leniency for the American swindler Charles Keating who donated millions of stolen dollars to Mother Teresa and lent her his private jet when she visited the United States. She refused to return the money, and praised Keating repeatedly. She supported Licio Gelli‘s nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature.[4] Gelli was reportedly known for being the head of the Propaganda Due masonic lodge, which was implicated in various murders and high-profile corruption cases in Italy, as well as having close connections with the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement and the Argentine Military Junta.[Wikipaedia}
Mother Teresa’s response to her critics was: “No matter who says what, you should accept it with a smile and do your own work”.
I hope that knowledge of the facts given above will assuage at least to some extent Shri Ribeiro’fears about the imaginary Hit List
