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Correspondent

23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Missionary Masks

TU.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 it 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...

Missionary Masks

TU.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 it 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.

Sacred Attire

Updated: Jan 30, 2025

The Siddhivinayak Temple Trust’s recent decision to implement a dress code prohibiting short skirts, torn jeans and other revealing attire is a necessary move to uphold the sanctity of religious spaces. Temples are spiritual spaces where devotees seek solace, offer prayers, and connect with the divine. Temples are not mere tourist attractions but sacred sanctuaries. The least that visitors can do is dress accordingly.


The Jagannath temple in Puri, Odisha, and the Banke Bihari temple in Vrindavan have already implemented similar rules, reflecting a growing recognition that religious spaces require a modicum of decorum. In the case of Siddhivinayak, the temple attracts thousands of devotees daily, many of whom have expressed discomfort over attire that they feel clashes with the temple’s spiritual ambience.


Few would question the need for decorum in a courtroom, a government office, or even an upscale restaurant. Yet, when religious institutions enforce dress codes to preserve their sanctity, a chorus of indignation often rises in the name of personal freedom, with such ‘critics’ arguing that such rules reflect moral policing or an imposition of traditionalist values.

But this argument confuses religious sanctity with public space liberalism. No one is being compelled to enter the temple, and those who do should respect the customs that govern it. Even in non-Hindu religious spaces, dress codes are the norm. One does not enter a gurdwara without covering their head, nor a mosque or church dressed in attire deemed unsuitable for prayer. The sanctity of a religious institution should not be sacrificed at the altar of modern whims.


To dismiss this as an encroachment on personal liberties is to misunderstand the nature of such spaces. Religious sites operate under different expectations than public thoroughfares or commercial hubs. They are designed for reflection, devotion, and ritual. While Indian society has rightly evolved towards greater personal freedom in many spheres, faith-based institutions must be allowed to maintain traditions that are integral to their identity. The temple trust has made it clear that its goal is not to impose regressive restrictions but to ensure that all visitors feel comfortable and that the sanctity of the temple is upheld.


Moreover, the argument that religious sites must remain entirely open-ended in their dress codes simply does not hold water. Many of the people who object to these restrictions would scarcely question the need for appropriate attire at a formal event or while meeting a dignitary. The principle is the same -respect for the setting dictates the mode of dress. Those who seek to frame this as a battle between liberalism and conservatism fail to grasp that such measures are about propriety, not repression.


In an era where the lines between cultural expression and decorum are increasingly blurred, it is worth remembering that not every rule is an infringement on liberty. If people can abide by dress codes in secular spaces, they should extend the same courtesy to places of worship.

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