Missionary Masks

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s maiden visit to India with a symbolic pilgrimage to Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata has sent out a message whose meaning is impossible to miss. The painfully familiar script is that India is a land of eternally suffering souls awaiting Western salvation.

Rubio’s visit to the order founded by Mother Teresa comes amid sustained American pressure over the Indian government’s refusal to renew the organisation’s FCRA licence since 2021. The timing is not accidental; nor is the sudden concern from American lawmakers like Chris Smith, who now sermonise about “religious freedom” and “minority persecution” while demanding India loosen scrutiny over foreign-funded missionary organisations.

India should reject this pressure outright. For decades, the Missionaries of Charity operated under a near-sacred halo carefully constructed by Western media and liberal institutions. Mother Teresa was transformed into a brand whose emotionally packaged images of wrinkled compassion amid Calcutta’s misery beamed into Western homes as proof of Christian moral superiority.

Beneath the carefully cultivated mythology lay disturbing questions that were either ignored or aggressively suppressed. As the late journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens argued in ‘Hell’s Angel,’ Teresa’s empire was built not on solving poverty but on preserving it as spectacle. Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into her organisation from across the globe. Yet Kolkata saw no transformation through world-class hospitals, research centres or modern public health institutions built with this money. Critics and former volunteers have repeatedly described the overcrowded facilities with poor sanitation, reused needles, inadequate medical care and even denial of pain relief. Teresa openly proclaimed that pain brought the poor closer to Christ.

Naturally, this philosophy was only reserved for the destitute. When Teresa herself fell ill, she sought treatment in advanced private hospitals abroad.

The contradictions did not end there. Teresa accepted honours and money from some of the world’s most unsavoury figures, including Haiti’s brutal Duvalier dictatorship. She defended fraudster Charles Keating even after prosecutors explained that his donations came from money stolen from ordinary citizens.

What Rubio’s visit exposes is the deeper fraud of the global missionary industry in India. The issue is not individual Christians or genuine acts of charity. The real problem is the cynical merger of humanitarian work with religious conversion and foreign ideological influence. Schools, orphanages and charities become instruments of cultural penetration and poverty becomes an opportunity for proselytization. Vulnerable communities are taught to regard their ancestral traditions as backward relics in need of spiritual replacement.

This is precisely why India’s FCRA regulations matter. No sovereign nation can allow unlimited foreign funding into opaque religious networks operating with ideological agendas. The hysteria from American politicians only confirms how deeply invested Western evangelical and church-linked ecosystems remain in India’s internal religious landscape.

America lectures India on pluralism while aggressively lobbying on behalf of missionary organisations accused of financial opacity and regulatory violations. India is expected to tolerate foreign-funded religious activism indefinitely because questioning it risks offending Western ‘liberal’ sentimentality.

Rubio’s Kolkata stop is a crude reminder that sections of the Western political establishment still view India through an old colonial lens - a land to be morally supervised and spiritually corrected. That door should be firmly shut.