RSS Says Bharat Ratna Awarded To Mother Teresa Should Be Taken Back

The late Nobel laureate Mother Teresa is being confronted with allegations of baby selling in her NGO, the Missionaries of Charity. The specific allegation pertains to a child being sold for Rs 1.2 lakh at the Missionaries of Charity in Jharkhand.

RSS lost no time in latching onto the scandal and Rajiv Tuli, its Delhi prachar pramukh, told India Today that the Bharat Ratna awarded to Mother Teresa should be taken back, if the allegations are true. “Indian citizens wouldn’t want the honour of Bharat Ratna to be tainted,” said Tuli to India Today. “In 1980, Mother Teresa was given the Bharat Ratna. Even then allegations were being made, and they are being made now as well. If they are proven to be true, we should rethink Mother Teresa’s Bharat Ratna.”

Tuli further added that Mother Teresa, who was granted sainthood by the Vatican last year, “never worked for people’s welfare”, and that religious conversion was her agenda. Meanwhile, BJP leader Subramanian Swamy, who is a sounding board for the RSS, backed Tuli’s comments. ‘‘I 100 per cent support it,” Swamy said while speaking to India Today, calling Mother Teresa’s work “a cover”. In this context, the maverick leader also referred to British author Christopher Hitchens’s book (The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice) and how it “documented all the fraud she’s done”.

But there are many like West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee who have a particular fondness for Teresa. Keen to set the record straight, Mamata intervened to say that “malicious attempts” were being made to “malign” the Missionaries of Charity Sisters. ‘‘The BJP wants to spare no one. It is highly condemnable. Let MOC continue to do its work for the poorest of the poor,’’ she said in a tweet. Meanwhile, the pressure is mounting on the Centre to probe the funds that have been received by the charitable organisation.