A soft but useless target

I wanted to keep my mouth shut on this issue, but the more I read about it, I feel compelled to add my 2 cents worth.

First, the issue: The RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat targeting Mother Teresa (it will be only Teresa henceforth in this piece), accusing her of doing conversion in the guise of charity and comments thereon from all and sundry.

Why did Bhagwat choose Teresa as the target? It must have been because she must be, by a distance, the most respected Indian icon of Christianity. Let us not mince words about this. Her charity work just burnished her iconic image, Bhagwat implies, all towards the end of recruiting for Christianity. I am no one to argue on this.

RSS has the unenviable task of recruiting to pad up the numbers of Hindus (adding to the majority – diminishing marginal returns). This is to be done by taking down the icons of the other religions. He chose Teresa. So, you hit where it hurts the most. Of course, you have your fellow travelers, even beyond the so-called Hindutva brigade, like Christopher Hitchens. Also, the target herself has been quite so obliging, by being seen with, taking donations for her charity from, and implicitly endorsing the murderous dictator Baby Doc Duvalier of Haiti and by kowtowing to the unconscionable demands of the Roman Catholic Church on the abortion and birth control fronts. Yes, there are allegations that people on death bed were baptized.

But, in my opinion this choice is inappropriate. If Teresa really did want to add to the Christian flock, she would have chosen people who would have been in their reproductive prime! Obviously lepers, terminally ill people, who were her clients for the most part, are most unsuited for the task at hand. Baptizing people on their death beds? That is a cul-de-sac, adding people to Christianity in the other world and not in this world! I credit Teresa with a certain level of intelligence that she would have seen the futility of her efforts in the alleged actions.

This is why I think Mohan Bhagwat’s choice of the target, quite soft but useless, in the back ground of conversions and reconversions, is ill advised!

Raghuram Ekambaram