Her Mandrake Root Manna

She made me cry more than once—after arriving in the UK (in 1985) I was repeatedly told, sometimes overtly, sometimes subtly, that I came from a city that was helpless, dire, desperate and was utterly beholden to Western Catholic charity. I felt angry, frustrated, and was naive enough to blame the Western media for the misinformation. Then, I studied Mother Teresa’s lectures, her films, her books and soon realised that most, if not all, the myth emanated from her own self. She repeatedly told the world she went around the city 24/7, ‘picking up’ the destitute from its squalid ‘gutters’ (she did not), that she fed up to 9,000 in her soup kitchens (she did not), she never refused a helpless child (she did as a rule), that the dying destitute in her so-called home for the dying, Nirmal Hriday, died a ‘beautiful death’ (they were treated harshly and often died a miserable, painful death).

Mother Teresa was an ultimate politician who worked on behalf of the Vatican. No, she was not an ‘agent’, as that would be conspiratorial. She did not have to do much subterfuge or skulduggery in India itself, as Indians, particularly the media, were in awe of her and connived with her. When she said in her Nobel speech that she inspired 61,237 fewer children from (slum) couples through “natural family planning” or abstaining, no one challenged her on her bogus and fantastic figure; neither did they ask her how, at the height of the Cold War, abortion could be the “greatest destroyer of peace” (said a thousand times, including in her Nobel speech).

I do not blame the world media as much as I blame Indian and particularly Calcutta media. Here she was, a jet-setting celebrity—although appended with the epithet ‘of Calcutta’—spending six to nine months in a year in Europe and the US, making strange claims about her work and about the disgusting state of the city, but never to be seen in the city’s disasters—major or minor. Why did they not her ask why she reused needles on her residents in Nirmal Hriday (it was official policy) when she herself received the finest care in the world’s best hospitals? Even after her death, the Indian fear of blue-bordered saris continues. On August 1, 2005, UK TV showed a child tied to a cot overnight in her orphanage—one Calcutta newspaper grudgingly rep­orted the matter with lots of ‘allegeds’. During her lifetime, even that would be unthinkable. She was white, she hobnobbed with President Reagan (they were the closest of buddies), and oh yes, she had the Nobel—so, she had to be divine! Did no one know that she hobnobbed with the Duvaliers of Haiti, whose brutality was unsurpassed (and whose opponents were often cut up and fed to dogs)? No one in India wanted to know! For the Western media, she was a metaphor, a set-piece, a stratospheric certainty of image in an uncertain and changing world. Conversely, Calcutta was the metaphor for absolute degradation where “foetuses are given to dogs to eat” (as remarked by her ‘other self’ Francis Goree). It was beyond the West’s interest, energy or remit to robustly challenge these wrong stereotypes. But did Indian journalists not know that her main bank was the Vatican Bank, a dark recess of corruption and intrigue? Before she died it was well known that she had accepted millions from Charles Keating, the notorious American swindler, but no one in India cared.

Bengalis showed some rare guts when she was beatified through a ‘miracle’ in 2003. Doctors, and even the then health minister, made statements that Monica Besra was cured by prolonged treatment, and not by an aluminium medal. Even Besra herself periodically said her cure was not a miracle. But the Vatican treated Indian opinion with the contempt it always has and proceeded with the canonisation. But what is so great about Catholic saints? People should realise that a Catholic saint does not have to be saintly or nice in the secular sense, but has to be ‘pure’ to Catholic dogma, esp­ecially on contraception and abortion. Jose Maria Escriva, a Fascist, is a Catholic saint; another Fascist, Cardinal Stepinac, is a ‘blessed’. ‘Saint’ John Paul II act­ively shielded the paedophile and criminal, Marcial Maciel, over many years. Mother Teresa wrote a letter of support for a convicted paedophile, priest Don­ald McGuire, asking people to overlook his ‘imprudence’.

If one looks around Mother Teresa’s homes in Calcutta today, one would find many of them acceptable. But one must not forget that this comes after 25 years of campaigning by me, and also persistent global criticism from Hemley Gonzalez, the American former volunteer who in 2008 was so utterly disgusted by what he saw that he founded a movement (‘Stop the Missionaries of Charity’) and founded his own Responsible Charity. Moreover, in the last six months, the order has spruced up a great deal, preparing for next week.

I would like to see the order held to account for negligence, for abuse, and yes, for child-trafficking. There is evidence that, a few years after Teresa’s Nobel, the order sold a child (S.P.) to a Belgian Catholic couple for Rs 1 lakh. A programme on this particular trafficking was shown a few times on Khoj Khabar (a Calcutta TV channel) in the early 2000s, but was ignored by public and authorities alike; the reaction would have been different if it was an Indian organisation committing the crime. The order should also be made answerable for secretive mass conversions—this is not a fantasy or an ‘alleged’ charge, but from the horse’s mouth—on January 14, 1992, Mother Teresa gloated about the conversion, in secret, of 29,000 dying people to a private audience in La Jolla, California. I do not get exercised about conversion per se, but converting unconscious people is dastardly and low. (Incidentally, both films are on YouTube.)

And yet, like obliging picaninnies, the Indian government is dutifully sending a delegation to the black-magic ceremony in Rome. (Hindus please note: the Pope is not allowed to wish Hindus personally even on Diwali.) Be that as it may, my own wish would be to reclaim Calcutta from Teresa—to sever the automatic connection of the two names as the whole wide world sees it. Calcutta’s image under the yoke of Teresa will take a century to recover. In the last 50 years, the city has lost an unimaginable amount from loss of international business and tourism and will continue to do so. But let us at least loudly proudly proclaim that we have nothing to do with a medieval creature of darkness—not any more.

(Chatterjee is the author of Mother Teresa: The Untold Story)