New Delhi, Feb 26 : It all started with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat's claim at a function organized by an NGO that the real motive behind Mother Teresa's charity work was conversion of the poor to the fold of Christianity.
The comments spread like wildfire with the media and the BJP's rivals demanding the party to come out with a response, what with the RSS sarsanghchalak's remarks coming mere days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi sought to allay the fears of the minority communities at a function organized by a christian church in Delhi.
BJP leader Meenakshi Lekhi, speaking to reporters outside Parliament House on Wednesday, stoked the fire by getting herself and her party involved in the controversy. Defending the RSS chief's comments, she said Mother Teresa herself had said that her real objective in life was missionary work, meaning converting people to Christianity.
To buttress her point, she cited a biography of Mother Teresa penned by former Chief Election Commissioner Navin Chawla, in which she claimed the Mother is quoted as saying during an interview that people often peg her for a social worker even though in reality she was in the service of Jesus and that her job was to bring people to the fold of Christianity by spreading its message.
However, matters took a turn on Thursday, when Navin Chawla, who has worked closely with Mother Teresa for decades, chose to dispute Lekhi's claims. Talking to the Times of India, Navin Chawla mocked Lekhi's skewed interpretation of his biography of Mother and wondered whether someone had summarized the book for Lekhi for want of time for her to read it. "Meenakshi Lekhi who is so bright and busy could not have read the book from cover to cover and maybe someone summarized it for her," Chawla said.
Chawla told the newspaper that he had directly asked Mother if she converts. "You know what she said? I do convert but convert you to be a better Hindu, better Muslim, better Catholic and better Sikh. Once you have found Him it is up to you to do what you want. Conversion is not my work, conversion is God's work," Chawla told the TOI. Chawla also told the paper that even when the inmates of Nirmal Hriday, a home for destitutes run by Mother Teresa, died their last rites were performed according to the rituals of their respective religions.
Meenakshi Lekhi, however, hit back at Chawla by penning an article on the Times of India in which she described the former diplomat as an "age-old loyalist who perhaps cannot remember the words in his own book." Quoting the dictionary meaning of the word 'Missionary' as a "person sent on a religious mission, especially one sent to promote Christianity in a foreign country", she wondered why, when the world at large has identified Mother Teresa as a missionary, Navin Chawla was trying to 'wipe clean the annals of history by claiming that she was not a missionary.'
In the article, however, Lekhi makes no mention of whether the RSS chief did attribute questionable motives to Mother's charity work. Instead, she urges Chawla to 'read the transcripts of the speech before making hasty judgements'. Saying that Bhagwat was speaking on 'the noble topic of serving for the society', she wonders why talking about selfless service and service free from religion was not being treated as a 'highly secular comment'.
In the concluding paragraph of the article even as she cautions against politicizing noble speech and work for political mileage, she draws a parallel between Mother Teresa and Mohan Bhagwat, saying both had one thing in common in that both of them endorsed service to society. However, if drawing a comparison between the two wasn't cringe-worthy enough, she then goes so far as to suggest that Mother's service was 'motivated service' whereas that of Bhagwat's 'selfless service'.
