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The RSS is wrong

Two interesting things happened last week.

RSS chief K S Sudershan, in his maiden address at the RSS Dassera rally in Nagpur, exhorted Christians nationwide to reject foreign missionaries and Indianise the church. While he grudgingly acknowledged the fact that most Indian Christians were patriotic, whatever that may mean, he accused foreign missionaries of wreaking havoc on the unity and integrity of India. He, in fact, accused them of conspiring to destabilise the nation. Within hours of the speech, the BJP issued a statement dittoing his views. In other words, Sudershan's view now has the official sanction of the party that leads the National Democratic Alliance.

On the very day that the RSS chief was thundering before his Dassera audience in Nagpur, the single most visible face of Christianity in India was quietly celebrating its golden jubilee in Calcutta with day-long prayers to mark the occasion. It was the 50th anniversary of the Missionaries Of Charity, the tiny order that Mother Teresa founded in 1950 when she left her cloister with 12 rupees in her pocket to work among the poorest of the poor.

An Albanian by birth, Mother Teresa came to India to proselytise, but soon got disillusioned with what she was doing and left the Loretto nuns to start her own order that not only eventually won her (and India, by implication) a Nobel Prize for Peace, but has also grown into the largest indigenous Christian effort to help the poor, the sick and the dying.

The Missionaries of Charity run over 450 educational institutions and homes for needy, abandoned children and sick, elderly people today. Over 4,000 Indian women dressed in the humble blue and white habit that Mother Teresa made into an insignia of her faith run these homes and work among the poorest of the poor to spread her vision of a more humane, just and tolerant society where the weak and the ailing also have a place under the sun.

Curiously, this is an entirely contrarian point of view to what the West is preaching today, where more and more of the world is being controlled by fewer and fewer people through their monopoly over wealth and power. Mother Teresa's world is based on the old-fashioned idea of Christian charity, which involves sharing and justice. Notions that are obsolete in today's capital-driven modern society, where the rich believe that they are entitled to control all the levers of power and opportunity while the poor must learn to fend for itself. That is why there are no Mother Teresas in the West. They would have been laughed out and ridiculed.

This remarkable woman succeeded precisely because she was working in a remarkable nation, India, which has a remarkable culture of tolerance, love, understanding and compassion. What she spoke of found thousands of voiceless supporters who helped her spread her message and assisted her in her work. Their collective achievement astonished the cynical West, which is now ready to canonise her for doing what she saw as her karma in the first place.

In other words, Mother Teresa is a shining example of the Indianising of the church. She is the best example of what the RSS wants. But, curiously, it all happened because a young Albanian girl, who was deeply religious but did not believe in organised faith, chose to leave her cloistered order and help those who were unable to help themselves. Thousands of sick, old people rejected by their families (who would have died on the streets unattended to) experienced love, not necessarily Christian love but love in its purest form, during the last few months of their lives.

Many young children who would have grown up on the streets, unattended and uneducated and would have contributed to our spiralling urban crime graph got an opportunity to go to school and find themselves gainful employment because of Mother Teresa and her sisters. And even though she has died, her work sustains simply because all that she did was essentially Indian in spirit. It was compassionate without being flashy. And, most important, it was sustainable by Indian effort, Indian love, Indian understanding.

To return to the RSS and its allegation, I am sure that there must be the odd foreign missionary who is doing wrong, who is spreading his faith through devious or incorrect means. But that can only be an exception in India where foreign missionaries have spread education, created some of the finest schools, helped build some of the best hospitals and tendered to the old and ailing with great care and concern. Some of it, I am sure, was driven by evangelism, but most of it was inspired by sheer compassion. Love for those who have been left to fend for themselves and have failed.

That is the sickness of Western society. The cruel rejection of all failure. It is driven by the insolence of wealth. Indian society, in fact Hindu society, has demonstrated a far better understanding of human issues and that is why Christianity has succeeded in its humane interventions in our society that has always welcomed those who are ready to help and heal.

That is where the RSS is wrong. It has failed to recognise the fact that whatever success Christianity has met with in India is only because it has successfully understood and adopted the spirit of India and, therefore, Hindutva. It is not here to convert but to work among the poorest of the poor. Of course, the Portuguese and the Dutch may have used the sword to spread their gospel, but that was many, many years ago and the world has changed a great deal since then. It is foolish blaming today's missionaries for what the colonisers did five hundred years ago.

Pritish Nandy

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