top of page

By:

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.

Selective Outrage

India’s left-liberal media has long prided itself on being the torchbearer of secularism, dissent and moral rectitude. In the aftermath of ‘Operation Sindoor,’ the precision military strike launched by the Modi government against Pakistan-based terror camps, it has revealed its not a principled commitment to peace or truth, but a disturbing penchant for ideological prejudice, performative sanctimony and selective outrage.


The operation itself was a textbook display of calibrated force and geopolitical prudence. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, often caricatured as ‘authoritarian’ by the ‘liberal’ English-language commentariat, chose patience over provocation. He consulted opposition leaders, held detailed discussions with defence chiefs and took key international stakeholders, notably the United States and Russia, into confidence before authorising limited military action. The symbolism of ‘Operation Sindoor’ was also carefully crafted: a pointed reminder that the attack’s real victims were Hindu women widowed by Pakistan-sponsored militants in Kashmir. The government’s briefings were also strategic and symbolic as two ranking female officers, one of them Muslim, were made the public face of the mission, underlining a new Indian confidence that blends military muscle with democratic pluralism.


But this was unacceptable for India’s entrenched ‘left-liberal’ press, steeped in academic jargon, Western validation and a knee-jerk hostility to anything remotely ‘Hindutva.’ That a Muslim officer briefed the nation on ‘Operation Sindoor’ was branded ‘tokenism’ by such commentators. Others crudely alleged that the April 22 Pahalgam massacre was the logical culmination of reported atrocities against Muslims since Modi came to power in 2014.


The semantic nitpicking over ‘Operation Sindoor’ was maddening. An editor of a prominent magazine dubbed the operation’s name as ‘patriarchal’ and coded in Hindutva tropes. In a bizarre case of moral inversion, sindoor was likened to symbols of ‘honour killings’ and gender oppression, ignoring both its cultural resonance and the cruel reality that these women had lost their husbands in cold blood. For years, India’s ‘secular’ commentariat nurtured a preordained binary: the Congress may be flawed but was at least ‘secular’ while the BJP was an inveterate ‘fascist.’ Thus, the 2002 Gujarat riots are always focused upon but the Congress-backed pogrom of the Sikhs in 1984 is either downplayed or rationalised. Terrorism in Kashmir is tragic, but state retaliation is ‘jingoism.’ A strong Muslim voice in government is ‘tokenism’ but its absence is ‘exclusion.’ Even journalistic rigour is selectively applied. When Pakistan claimed to have downed Indian jets, some Indian outlets rushed to amplify the story before verification, inadvertently echoing enemy propaganda.


Dissent is vital in any democracy. But when its becomes indistinguishable from disdain, when editorial choices are dictated by ideological conformity, then the press becomes a caricature of itself. Ironically, many of these journalists enjoy robust free speech and loudly lament India’s supposed slide into ‘fascism’ from the safety of their X handles. Yet they turn a blind eye to Putin’s repression, Erdogan’s purges or Xi Jinping’s camps. In their eyes, Modi remains the greatest threat to democracy even as they broadcast their outrage freely, without fear of censorship or reprisal. ‘Operation Sindoor’ was a statement of cultural self-confidence. That confidence has rattled those who have spent their careers gatekeeping Indian discourse. Today, their monopoly is over. The people are watching and they no longer believe that the emperor has clothes.

Comments

bottom of page