Mother Teresa issued thousands of disclaimers about any knowledge of politics, but even a casual look at her career would make one wonder if she "doth protest too much."

I wish to make it absolutely clear that unlike Christopher Hitchens, I am not judging Mother Teresa from a leftist sanctimonious angle. According to Hitchens, Mother Teresa was bad because she did not share his politics. I am afraid I have no time for such a view, not least because I have no defined politics myself.

On an international level, Mother Teresa's political agenda were narrow -- the "politics" of human reproductive intervention, and, Catholicism. In India however, she often involved herself with less subtle and more earthly politics.

On the issues of abortion, contraception and Catholicism, she found her political allies in a particular spectrum in the political arena, who are most vociferous in the United States. Indeed, her biggest political allies were also in this country, as were her most powerful financial backers. Not all her political friends were Catholics, and some -- like Ronald Reagan -- are sturdy Christians from other denominations. Without actually giving an overt call to the American people to vote Republican, she made it very clear -- especially by meeting Republican hopefuls before elections -- whom she supported. When the Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole was once challenged by his own party over his anti-abortion credentials, he invoked the Teresa card, saying that he had been endorsed by Mother Teresa.

Many of Mother Teresa's political friends were racists and anti-Semites, although she herself was neither. But she showed remarkable expediency in allying herself with anybody who would propagate her causes. This was especially evident in the Indian context, which I shall come to later.

Mother Teresa's international political diktat came form the Vatican. The friendship between Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II was more special than which existed between Reagan and Thatcher. Mother never saw eye to eye with the previous popes, who were all sitting on the fence on the issue of contraception. The current pope, by unequivocally declaring contraception "anti-life" immediately became her darling. He has also ruled out any discussion on the matter of women priests -- indeed, when the Church of England voted in favour of women priests he sent a midnight telegram of protest. Mother Teresa herself remained irrevocably opposed to women priests. Explaining why women should not be priests, she once (in 1984) told an Indian journalist, "Nobody can be a better priest than Our Lady, and she remained only the handmaiden of the Lord." The Hindu journalist misinterpreted "Our Lady" as "our ladies" and sent a message through the international newswires that Mother Teresa approved of women priests. Mother was not amused -- many disclaimers followed, including one that emphasised that she stood by what the pope had said on the issue.1 In 1983, The National Associatrion of Religious Women in the US -- the nuns' union as it were -- rebelled against the pope on the issue of women priests. It passed a resolution at its annual convention determined to "stand together and not be broken." Now how did the pope deal with the situation -- a simple phone call to Mother Teresa (she was at the Vatican at the time) was all was necessary.

Mother Teresa frequently stated that the "happiest day of my life is when the Holy Father came to Calcutta." It was upon her insistence that the pope decided to visit this heathen - Marxist city with a virtually non-existent Catholic population. It is noteworthy that Mother's happiest day was not when she got the divine revelation that she must leave her cloisters, or when she founded her order, or her first home, or treated her first resident, but when she managed to bring the head of an alien order into an Indian city.

After Mother Teresa's death, there remain in the small coterie of the pope's closest circle other ultra-orthodox stalwarts like Cardinal O'Connor of New York, Cardinal Sin of Philippines and Cardinal Ratzinger. Ratzinger, who was also close to Mother Teresa, cannot tolerate other religions -- he recently called Buddhism "auto-erotic". He also excommunicated his own priest., Tissa Balasuriya of Sri Lanka, whose crime it was to portray the Virgin Mary in a robust, unorthodox light. (Balasuriya has recently been accepted back in fold after a sustained world wide protest amongst liberal Catholics.) Ratzinger heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (CDF), the successor to the Holy Office of the Inquisition. In this all male, chauvinistic, women-unfriendly club Mother Teresa was made welcome, because her views were identical to those of the male members. She was their most effective ambassador. Indeed, this supremely feminine wispy nun clad in a saree was regarded an honorary man by the Vatican inner circle.

Every religious order wishes to have footholds in territories ruled over by other faiths, but the Vatican found it difficult, if not impossible, to break into the Muslim and Socialist blocks. Both the Vatican political machinery and Mother know that she was the one person who would be allowed in hostile territory. Any government in the world who would reject her advances would do so at their own peril.

Regimes which would not normally allow the possession of the Bible, had to accede to her request to be let in. She went to Ethiopia, Libya, Tunisia and Iraq. These footholds were ostensibly (in press briefings etc.) for charitable purposes, but in reality they were to fly the lone flag of Catholicism. In Tunis for instance, her order has a convent but no home; in Libya, they would not be allowed to found a home even if they wanted to.

Fidel Castro found it impossible to say no to her, as he knew he would alienate many of his supporters around the world if he did so. Under Vatican diktat, Mother flew in (by private jet) to Havana from Fort Lauderdale, Florida on 9 July 1986 to meet Castro. Castro was obliged to agree to her coming in to Cuba, as saying no to Mother Teresa would have meant committing a public relations suicide. Once the permission had been given, Mother Teresa declared quite frankly that her mission in Cuba would be "involved in spiritual work."

During the 1980s Mother became obsessed with getting into Soviet Union, and wrote Gorbachev many a letter to be let in. One remembers the famous photograph of her addressing a press conference in Moscow on 21 August 1987 beneath a portrait of Karl Marx. Her last obsession was China. She was known to mutter even in the midst of her severe illnesses, "Let us pray that we get into China."

Latin America was a special case for both the pope and Mother. Here the two have taken on the strategy of fighting socialism with Catholicism. Both Mother and John Paul II are especially worried about "Liberation Theology", which they consider a pernicious Marxist corruption of Christian teaching. Mother Teresa had great contempt for do-gooder priests who engage in community work: "I say to all priests: You have not become priests to be social workers."2  The Vatican has singled out Nicaragua a special case because of the popularity there of the Sandinistas, and Mother Teresa predictably went in with the cross -- her order's newest establishment in Nicaragua (founded 1997) is a contemplative house, when what this country needs is more charitable institutions.

Because of her association with the pope, Mother Teresa is not universally popular in South America. Many of the priests there treat her with suspicion and contempt. Once in Brazil, Brothers belonging to her order who had come to set up a mission, were asked by local priests to "move on".3

South American priests have not forgiven the pope's treatment of Archbishop Romero of El Salvador who was murdered in 1980 by the country's CIA sponsored death squad while conducting mass. Ten months before he was killed, Romero had travelled to the Vatican to tell the pope about the relentless murder of citizens and Catholic priests who were standing up to the military junta; the same pope, who was bringing the world down with his protestations about human rights violations in Eastern Europe, kept Romero waiting for six weeks before meeting him -- although normally Archbishops have immediate access to the pontiff. When John Paul finally met Romero briefly, he sent him away with advice to mend his ways.

Vatican's support of Haiti's military (and fascist Catholic) dictatorships was equally bizarre, and here too Mother Teresa vociferously echoed the Vatican line. When Haiti's military overthrew the democratically elected (socialist Catholic) priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991, the Vatican was the only state to formally recognise the junta. Even according to John Paul II's hagiographer Tad Szulc:

"Strange as it may sound, there were no Vatican protests against massive human rights violations, including numerous killings, during the junta's rule, and not a single public word of support for Aristide's restoration to office. Subsequently, Aristide applied to the Holy See to allow him to leave priesthood altogether."4

Mother Teresa of course, was an old friend of the Haiti militia. She and the notorious Duvalier family -- who used to "rule" with the help of their private army the Tonton Macoutes -- had a tremendous mutual attraction. When she visited Haiti as the guest of the Duvaliers (to receive the Haitian Legion d'Honneur) she heaped paeans on Madame Duvalier who not only had milked millions off the state coffers, but was also an instrument of torture. Mother said to Michele Duvalier, "Madame President, the country vibrates with your life work." She also added that she had never seen "the poor people so familiar with their head of state as they were with her. It was a beautiful lesson for me."

I am aware that Mother's apologists say that she was just being nice to her hosts -- part of diplomatic protocol. After going through a few hundred speeches she made in her lifetime in all possible corners of the earth to all manner of hosts, I am afraid I cannot agree with this line of argument. She hardly ever spoke about her hosts in her speeches, even when accepting awards -- her speeches were usually quite prolix, starting off with the poverty theme (of both body and mind) and then launching into a long diatribe against abortion.

The praise heaped on the Duvaliers was a special certificate that she reserved for the very select, whose life view she endorsed. I can think of only Reagan who received similar endorsement. Even Rome's mayor Rutelli -- he who said he wants to rid the city of gypsies by 2000 (5) -- who she was particularly fond of, had not received such praise.

It is not that Mother Teresa condoned indiscriminate killing by ruthless dictators, but her line was -- if you are doing all right in religion and abortion, then whatever else you might do I shall overlook.

Mother's most useful political role came in the years leading to the demolition of the Socialist block. It is now known (accepted by the Vatican) that the pope worked closely with the CIA to bring about the just death of Eastern Europe. He and Mother worked tirelessly to be let into one Eastern Bloc country after another, years before the Berlin wall came down. Again the sole purpose was political destabilisation, rather than charity -- the case of Mother's East Berlin home is an example. She came to East Berlin in June 1980, and led a procession of 20000 Catholics -- she called it an "outdoor mass", although I cannot remember her having held an outdoor mass anywhere else -- that was not her style. She opened her home in East Berlin in 1981 at the height of the cold war -- two years after her Nobel even the East German authorities could not say no to her. But within days of the Berlin wall coming down, the home was closed -- when in fact, such a home would have been direly needed to give succour to eastern Berlin with its new and manifold problems.

Ostensibly however, Mother Teresa maintained distance from Cold War politics, even in situations where her intervention (or mere association) would have been greatly beneficial to detainees and dissenters -- when all the winners of the 1979 Nobel Prizes decided to send a letter to Brezhnev protesting at the detention of a young Russian scientist, the lone laureate who would not sign the letter was Mother Teresa -- it would be (look) too "political" before the world. Again, in India she behaved differently. In July 1997, when a development worker called Sanjoy Ghose was kidnapped by separatist guerrillas in Assam, Mother Teresa (to her credit) sent a faxed appeal from the Vatican (she was here on her very last visit) asking the terrorists to release him. (Ghose was later found murdered.)

Mother Teresa was instrumental in trivialising the Cairo Population Conference of 1994. As a sovereign state, the Vatican was invited to participate in the conference, although I find it odd that a "state" without any women and children among its population would be invited at all -- but then, who am I to quibble at such matters -- such is the clout of the Vatican.

The Catholic establishment fought tooth and nail to wreck the conference and succeeded to a large extent. Among the ploys it employed was a personally signed sugary letter addressed to the conference by Mother Teresa -- it contained her usual words: "If a mother can kill her own child, what is there to stop you and me from killing each other?" She also made it quite clear that she had the capacity to look after all the millions of unwanted children in the world: "If there is a child that you don't want or can't feed or educate, give that child to me. I will look after that child." No doubt, most of the non Catholic delegates believed her -- Mother Teresa did not tell lies! After the Conference was over, the Vatican held it to ransom by refusing to sign the common declaration unless the wording was changed -- the pope and Mother Teresa refused to accede that artificial contraception should be available to women under any circumstance, including marriage or even after rape. In 1996, the Vatican cancelled their token $2500 annual contribution to UNICEF because it was offering the "morning after pill" to women who had been raped in central African refugee camps.

After the Cairo conference came the 1995 Fourth Conference on Women in Beijing. Here Mother Teresa went one step further. She roped in Mercedes Wilson from the right wing ultra orthodox Family of the Americas Foundation to carry her letter (that she had written unsolicited) and read it to the conference. Mother's letter was trenchant, and attacked the concept of the independent woman:

"No jobs, no plans, no possessions, no idea of 'freedom' can take the place of love. ...Yet we can destroy this gift of motherhood, especially by the evil of abortion, but also by thinking that things like jobs or positions are more important ....."

The letter made headline news around the world -- that the Conference also received a signature and poster campaign from a thousand poor women of Calcutta supporting its work (sent through the Family Planning Association of India) never became known.

Many of Mother's most high profile admirers are independent women, and indeed some of them might even think that career is more important than child rearing -- I hope people like Joan Collins, Julia Roberts, Gina Lollobrigida, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Hurley -- not to mention thousands of media women from around the world -- realise in what contempt they were held by their heroine.

In her own case, Mother Teresa did not deem herself a career woman, as she was "doing it for Jesus".

I hate to acknowledge this, but I think that when it comes to social issues, even the present pope is much more liberal than Mother Teresa -- the pope, in his letter to the Beijing conference did not mention the "handmaiden" role, but said that men and women are equal but different -- "uni-duality". He also said unequivocally, "Thank you, women who work!"

Mother Teresa's protestations that she did not personally attend international conferences because that would be too political, do not stand up to scrutiny because she was an official Vatican delegate in the 1975 UN International Women's Conference in Mexico City; the Vatican did not however allow her to head the delegation -- that honour went to a man -- Bishop Ramon Torrella Cascante.

So far as abortion is concerned, it was Mother Teresa who changed it from a personal to political issue over the last few decades. Left to themselves, the old men at the Vatican, one suspects, would have been ignored as a bunch of out of touch fogies.

It was astonishing that the world media reported with great deference Mother Teresa's call to the thousands of women in Bangladesh who had become pregnant after being raped by Pakistani soldiers during the country's independence war in 1971, to go on and have the babies. The sole voice critical of her was that of Germaine Greer, who was dismissed as a "loony feminist" by journalists. The barbaric torture unleashed on these captive women was described by Joyce Goldman writing for the American magazine Ms. (6) Goldman wrote about the women being held in barracks and used as "cigarette machines" by soldiers, and one of the latter was quoted as saying, "We used the girls until they died." She described the case of an eight year old girl who was found to be too small for the soldiers' needs and was slit to accommodate them and then raped until she died.

It is interesting that Mother Teresa did not utter a word of condemnation about the soldiers' actions or even a word of sympathy for the women. Her entire obsession was that the raped women if pregnant must not have abortions. She could have extended assistance toward all the tortured and abused women, but instead she chose to offer help -- and that too only until childbirth -- to only those raped women who would have their babies. What is not generally known is how much heed was paid to Mother's frantic calls -- fewer than fifty women actually had the babies, that too for various reasons unconnected with Mother's plea.

Outside the Indian sub-continent, Mother Teresa would move the earth to prevent a single abortion. Indeed, she often travelled the earth to stop an abortion, or for the cause of abortion. Back in May 1981 she heard that her friend the anti-abortion Republican senator Mark Hatfield had voted against the Hyde amendment which sought to prohibit federal funding of abortion for poor women who had been subject to rape or incest -- he did it for a technical reason, but that did not stop Mother Teresa to travel to Capitol Hill to quiz her friend for two hours (in the company of two militant anti-abortion activists) about what he was up to -- "She ...... made a very heavy pitch on the abortion question," he said. The anti-abortion lobby made Hatfield's life so miserable that he was forced to admit, "They have just as mean, uncompromising, unloving spirit as anyone I've faced on Vietnam or Panama Canal or any other controversial issue. You hear about the power of the National Rifle Association and its communications system in reaching Congress,... well let me tell you, they're pikers compared to these outfits." Although Mother Teresa was at the helm of this "mean, uncompromising, unloving" pack, Hatfield spared her, saying she was a naive old lady who was being manipulated -- she was always likewise spared whatever she did. Later, she met Hatfield in the company of President Reagan (who was in favour of the Hyde amendment) and made it very clear that letting the side down (for whatever reason) was not something she took to very kindly. If this is not active politics, I would like to know what is.

Mother Teresa had actively campaigned against Geraldine Ferraro (a Catholic who did not have an absolute objection to abortion) during the US presidential elections of 1984, when she was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. On 15 October, New York's Cardinal O'Connor launched a bitter public attack against Ferraro at a meeting in Cathedral High School -- Mother Teresa suddenly "appeared unannounced" on the dais and stood by O'Connor throughout the length of the speech. Three days later Ferraro was suddenly told that she was not welcome at the Catholic Political Dinner Meeting that she was supposed to speak at -- it is well known that Mother Teresa had been influential in making the organisers take that decision. At a later date, O'Connor had the honesty to admit that his critics found him "meddle in politics to much." (CNS sep 98). Such a statememt would never pass Mother Teresa's lips -- honesty was not one of her fortes.

In February 1994, Mother Teresa especially came to Washington D.C. to file an amicus curiae in favour of Alexander Loce (see also Chapter 1) who was being prosecuted by the state of New Jersey for vandalising his former girl-friend's abortion clinic. Her letter to the Supreme Court was in her usual vein -- long winded and (humbly) describing all the work she was doing with poor. I believe an amicus curiae can be filed in the US only by an American citizen, so she said, "Like that [unborn] child, I can be considered an outsider. I am not an American citizen. ...In many senses I know what it is like to be without a country. I also know what is like to be an adopted citizen of other lands."

She went on to heap praise on US civilisation ("..in a uniquely courageous and inspiring way, America has kept faith." etc.) before coming to the ad rem; she said, "Yet, there has been one infinitely tragic and destructive departure from those American ideals in recent memory. It was this court's own decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) to exclude the unborn child from the human family. You ruled that a mother, in consultation with her doctor, has broad discretion, guaranteed against infringement by the United States Constitution, to choose to destroy her unborn child. ...America needs no word from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation.

"The Constitutional Court of the Federal Republic of Germany recently ruled that 'the unborn child is entitled to its rights to life independently of acceptance by its mother;..' Americans...must weep that your own government, at present, seems blind to this truth."

I think people will agree with me that these are not the words of an other-worldly nun.

Eight months prior to Loce v. New Jersey (I am afraid I am not aware of the outcome of the case) Mother Teresa had found herself in Dublin stoking up the already boiling political passions over an abortion that has gone into Irish history -- that of the 14 year old girl who is known as "X", who fell pregnant as result of rape by an older married man. In June 1993 Mother Teresa was interviewed on the 98 FM radio talk show hosted by the popular Father Michael Cleary where she ruled out abortion for "X" saying, "Abortion can never be necessary because it is pure killing." (7) Father Cleary (who was later discovered to have had a wife for 26 years and two grown up children), and who maintained that the "X" case was a conspiracy by liberals to change the law, asked Mother if she would ever accept abortion in cases of rape. "No, never," (8) she replied. As it happened, "X" had had a miscarriage by then.

Ireland had had a abortion referendum in November 1992, which, despite non-stop prayers by Mother Teresa, gave women the right to travel to another country for abortion. In 1990, she had lost another marathon prayer battle (backed up by representations to Prime Minister Thatcher and various MPs) to have the UK abortion bill quashed. I hope these circumstances -- central to Mother's life view and being -- are brought up during beatification, when miracles will be invoked -- such as the one when she was praying for funds for a property in London, only to open a purse and find the exact amount in cash!

Mother Teresa seemed to have felt some kind of obligation to interfere in Ireland's social and political processes. Before the1995 referendum on divorce, she wrote a letter addressing the Irish nation asking the population to vote against legalising divorce. The pope also issued a similar statement. This led the Irish columnist Gene Kerrigan to remark that "people who keep silent when children are raped by priests are now full of chat."(9) Mother was also full of prayers, which failed again -- the "Yes" vote won.

Some people have always been more equal in the eyes of the Vatican top brass -- it was not therefore surprising when Mother Teresa made an exception when it came to Princess Diana's divorce. Commenting on her marriage, she told an American journalist, "It is good that it [the royal marriage] is over. ........I know I should be preaching family love and unity, but in their case..........."(10) She would of course tell millions of ordinary women to live in a violent and abusive marriage. Similarly the Vatican has always been only too keen to allow the Monaco royal family to divorce, when ordinary Catholics are denied annulments.

Mother was confronted on the issue of paedophile priests by the Dublin journalist Kathy Ward. She replied, "Pray, pray and make sacrifices for those who are going through such terrible temptations."(11) It is not that she was against custodial sentencing per se: she once said in New Orleans that she wanted to open a special jail for doctors who performed abortions.(12)

Contraception was another political battleground for Mother, although she kept utterly quiet on the issue in India. In a fairly recent television address to the American nation, she declared, "Once that living love is destroyed by contraception, abortion follows very easily. .........let us never bring in the worst problem of all, that is to destroy love. This is what happens when we tell people to practise contraception and abortion." (13) In her eyes, abortion and contraception were two sides of the same coin -- I wish her millions of contraception loving devotees the world over realise that.

Mother Teresa was silent on contraception in India because here opposition to contraception is considered akin to terrorism against the state, by governments of all political persuasions. Mother once got slightly unstuck in Mexico on the grievous charge of violation of national constitutional principles -- the newspaper Diario del Pacifico charged her with contempt of the country's constitution when she opposed birth control at a conference in Acapulco in August 1982 -- she quickly left for Honduras leaving the controversy behind her.

It is not entirely true that Mother Teresa said nothing against contraception in India. Unable to take a moral stance on the issue, she part-funded a "medical" study on natural contraception to prove her case. Incidentally this (substantially expensive) study is the only medical or paramedical activity that she ever contributed to. There are enormous opportunities for somebody with her level of funds to contribute to medical research in Calcutta, because here lies the School of Tropical Medicine, an internationally renowned centre for tropical diseases -- the malaria parasite was discovered here, earning Ronald Ross a Nobel Prize in1902. The "Tropical School" undertakes original research in tuberculosis, leprosy, malaria (a real scourge of India), malnutrition, specific health problems of child labourers -- all of which were supposed to be projects dear to Mother Teresa's heart, but none of which she ever assisted in any way.

Mother's natural contraception study, entitled "Symptothermia Vis a Vis Fertility Control" was headed by her own gynaecologist Professor Ajay Ghosh. They "studied" 17000 slum women of Calcutta and showed that natural contraception, with the help of a thermometer, a temperature chart and an ability to check the character of cervical mucus, worked.

The study is statistically heavily flawed, but eventually it was published in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology of India (1982; 32: 443-447), with which Professor Ghosh has close links. It is now quoted ad nauseum by the Catholic anti contraception brigade as a valid study. I know it for a fact that many of the women in the study who became pregnant went on to have abortions.

Professor Ghosh, who used to perform abortions with gusto in the past, has now given them up. He is probably the only gynaecologist in Calcutta not to do them -- Mother's single success story in Calcutta.

Mother Teresa was convinced that natural contraception should be the norm rather than a matter of choice. She talked about it at length in her Nobel speech:

"And in Calcutta alone in six years -- it is all in Calcutta -- we have had 61,273 babies less from the families who would have had, but because they practise this natural way of abstaining, of self-control, out of love for each other. We teach them the temperature metre which is very beautiful, very simple, and our poor people understand. And do you know what they have told me? Our family is healthy, our family is united, and we can have a baby whenever we want. So clear -- those people in the street, those beggars -- .."

Well, beautiful it may be, but natural contraception is anything but simple. Just imagine the scene -- a beggar woman lying on a pavement in Calcutta in her shack ("walls" made of gunny drapings) getting up in the morning -- with 16 wheeler trucks thundering by, filling her "room" with diesel smoke -- then coyly checking if her cervical mucus has turned "slippery mucoid", then picking up the fertility thermometer from the pavement to check her BBT (basal body temperature), and finally neatly recording the temperature on a beautiful chart pinned on to a gunny "wall".

I do not think it would an exaggeration to say that a good few middle class women would find natural contraception techniques a bit trying. But of course, Mother Teresa's "beautiful poor" would anything for her. No matter, less than 2% of female beggars and less than 25% of female slum dwellers have any reading skills at all -- but I doubt if any would able to read small thermometer calibrations in English and chart them on a graph. No matter, fevers, especially malaria, are rife in this population and would make BBT somewhat untenable.

And yet, when Mother Teresa -- who washed hypodermic needles in cold water before re-using them for the umpteenth time and who supplied one bottle for twenty babies in her homes -- told her "beautiful" tale of natural contraception to the world, everybody believed her. A saint does not tell lies -- if she says she supplies thousands of fertility thermometers to Calcutta's slum women, then supply them she must! It is scientifically impossible to calculate exactly how many less children were born to certain number of couples practising a certain method of birth control -- one only hazard a very rough guess. In that context Mother's Nobel Prize figure of "61,273" is particularly disingenuous, and was quoted to mislead the world -- yes, deliberately.

Empowered women, who have everything going for them, who are in an equal relationship, who are able to say no to their partners -- natural contraception is for them (maybe). It is bizarre to propose such a method to slum women -- perhaps this is another example of how out of touch Mother Teresa was with Indian slum women.

A (very articulate) Irish Catholic woman called Maire Mullarney once wrote in a Catholic weekly (14) how she finished up with 11 children through practising natural contraception. "The greatest damage was done by the authorities who persistently linked abortion and contraception," she wrote. She implicated the popes in the suffering caused to women through this method. However Mother Teresa is never included in the "authorities", although she had been the most high profile person in the world who used to propound that such a link irrevocably existed; it was partly due to her imprimatur that the Vatican got its courage to go out and tell the world of the virtues of natural family planning.

Regarding her statistic of how many less babies were born to the poor in Calcutta, Mark Tully, the BBC's former India correspondent -- and one of her admirers -- has remarked, "It is not known how the figure was arrived at."(15).Nonetheless, the figure doubled itself eighteen months later, when Mother claimed in Washington D.C. that her "beautiful method" had resulted in 134,000 fewer babies in Calcutta in seven years.(16)

Having given up on contraception and abortion in India, Mother chose instead to concentrate her political brief on Catholicism. Although her comment "I help Hindus to become better Hindus, Muslims better Muslims ...[etc.]" is regularly vaunted by the media, it is well known to those close to her that she had an (entirely understandable) sense of unfulfilment owing to the utter lack of impact Catholicism had made in India during her lifetime. Once Edward Desmond from Time (17) magazine asked her, "Friends of yours say you are disappointed that your work has not brought about more conversations in this great Hindu nation." Her reply had not been very convincing. Desmond went on to ask, "And should they [Hindus] love Jesus too?", to which she replied, "Naturally, if they want peace, if they want joy, let them find Jesus."

Mother Teresa took a keen interest in the complex political processes of India; she allied herself with the political party which she felt was friendliest to Catholicism. This she felt was the Congress party, of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Mother had a personal relationship with Indira Gandhi, and her ties with the Gandhi family became stronger after Mrs Gandhi's son Rajiv married the Italian Catholic Sonia. Even today, in all of Mother's Delhi homes large portraits of Indira and Rajiv (former Prime Ministers both) hang beside her own picture.

In India's vibrant democratic history the darkest period was between 1975 and 1977, when Mrs Gandhi imposed a "State of Emergency" on the country after being judicially indicted of election malpractices. The period of Emergency in India is one difficult to describe to an outsider -- from a politically open society, India overnight became a country of midnight (and midday) knocks on the door. Political censorship was imposed on newspapers, television, radio and even commercial producers of films and entertainment -- when Kishore Kumar, India's most popular singer refused to sing at a fund raising party for Congress, Mrs Gandhi's son Sanjay issued terse notes to all the record companies (including HMV India) to scrap all his contracts -- as a result he was banned from all broadcasting systems, public or private, and shops had to take his records off their shelves.

A draconian new law called the Maintenance of Internal Security Act was passed, under which anybody could be imprisoned (without a reason being given) and detained indefinitely. The jails were at bursting point with political prisoners, among them Mahatma Gandhi's one time associate Jayaprakash Narayan, a leader of the masses and considered above party politics -- it was later revealed that he had been slow poisoned in prison by arsenic, causing his kidneys to fail.

The real ruler of India during Emergency was Mrs Gandhi's late younger son Sanjay, who did not hold any office of the state, but issued all the orders. Sanjay had a passion for population control and issued monthly "sterilisation targets". As a consequence, slum dwellers (mostly men) were rounded up and forcibly sterilised -- among them many young men who had never been married.

Sanjay also cared deeply for Delhi's beautification, and one fateful night bulldozers arrived at the Turkman Gate slums, where the "poorest of the poor" among Delhi's Muslims had lived for generations. By morning, Turkman Gate became a clean expanse.

The people deployed to keep order during Emergency were mainly black shirt criminals from Sanjay's "Youth Wing", assisted by uniformed officers from the cryptically named Research and Analysis Wing. A group of ten people milling at a street corner was considered a "political assembly" and arrested. Disappearances became common.

It was moving to see that Mother Teresa considered her friendship with Mrs Gandhi precious enough to overlook the small incident at the Turkman slums, and the ongoing programmes of forced sterilisation. Issuing an approval certificate for the state of Emergency, she said, "People are happier. There are more jobs. There are no strikes."(18)

I do not think it is good enough to say that Mother was not aware of the goings on during Emergency because of censorship -- the Catholic establishment was well aware of the forced sterilisation activities. She was actually criticised by the Catholic press for her comments, even in the United States, where a long leader in American Catholic Church criticised her for ignoring human rights abuses.

When Mrs Gandhi was overthrown and all the horrific details of Emergency were exposed, Mother Teresa did not withdraw her comments. Indeed her friendship with the Gandhi family went from strength to strength. One of the key players in Mother's political activities in India, especially in her dealings with the Gandhi dynasty, is Navin Chawla, one of her two official biographers. Chawla is a top ranking civil servant in Delhi who is well known to smooth her ways through Indian bureaucracy. During the Emergency, Chawla was especially close to the tyrant Sanjay Gandhi -- after Sanjay's death, he quickly switched his allegiance to Rajiv and Sonia (the brothers had not been the best of friends).

It is well known that Mother Teresa disliked Morarji Desai, who became Prime Minister of India in 1977 following Indira Gandhi's defeat. Her letter to Desai protesting at the curbing of certain benefits that Christian missionaries enjoyed is much flaunted by Catholic circles as an example of her courage -- and indeed courageous it was, being uncharacteristically straightforward and only lightly charged with her usual plangent echolalia. But it contained a passage which betrays a degree of viciousness hitherto unknown; addressing the 82 year old Desai, Mother said, "Are you not afraid of God?................Mr Desai, you are so close to meeting God face to face. I wonder what answer you will give..............."

It is widely known that Desai was hurt by her comments. He however went on to live another 17 years and died in 1995, aged 99.

In the last few years, Mother Teresa successfully avoided direct political involvement in India, save for the one episode over quotas for dalit Christians. These are Christians who are genealogically lower caste Hindus, and are demanding inclusion in the positive discrimination quotas that lower caste Hindus are entitled to -- these quotas apply to all jobs and college and university places, and in some areas 80% of places may be reserved. The Indian government said that Christians by definition are casteless and refused to accede to the dalit Christians' demands.

During November 1995, all Christian denominations in India organised massive protests over the dalit issue, urging the government to rethink its decision on "lower caste Christians". They were delighted when Mother Teresa agreed to join in, as it raised the profile from a national to an international level. On 18 November, Mother Teresa participated in a dharna (sit-in) and fast in Delhi demanding reservations for dalit Christians.

Then suddenly criticism of her actions started flooding in, especially from the Indian media, who are normally sympathetic to her (a lot of resentment exists in India over reservations). Even her dear old Calcutta Statesman, published a sarcastic cartoon, asking why she should be spared when Muslims are called communal and divisive if they ask for quotas for extremely poor members of their community. Naturally, the Hindu party the BJP, was quite scathing. Sushma Swaraj of the BJP, calling her sit-in "a pitiful event" said, "Mother Teresa, instead of fighting this evil practice [of caste] wants to introduce the evil in her own religion. Her actions will do no good to the society, the country or to her own religion."

Mother Teresa, who moved quite expertly in response to public and media opinion in India, now did an utter volte-face. She took the unprecedented step of calling a press conference (on 24 November) at Mother House in Calcutta and denied all knowledge of the sit-in! She said she thought it was merely a prayer session. Her denial was emphatic: "I have never participated in any sit-in demonstrations or demanded reservations for dalit Christians."(19) A professional politician could not have done it better.

The Christian community in India widely accused her of a "let down". Asked to comment on her denial, Bishop Vincent Consessao said, "When we invited her, we gave her the entire programme but it probably did not register in her mind."(20)

Why Mother suddenly and so dramatically ran away from the dalit issue is open to conjecture; one reason could be that she did not want to embarrass the Congress party, which was in power in India at the time. I personally think Mother Teresa would have enhanced her reputation in India (amongst both Christians and non Christians) if she had shown integrity over the issue rather than take a U-turn -- but then, she was never entirely comfortable in her adopted country.

Sunanda K Datta-Ray, formerly editor of the Calcutta Statesman and editorial adviser to the Singapore Straits Times, who had known and dealt with Mother Teresa (purely in a journalistic capacity) for years, has always strongly contested Mother Teresa's naive and innocent image when it comes to matters of intrigue. He has told of an incident when he was asked to interview Mother Teresa for a television programme. On the eve of the interview he did a preparatory visit and asked Mother some ever so slightly uncomfortable questions, to do with theological issues -- the next day he discovered that he had been removed as the interviewer at Mother's own insistence, and Desmond Doig (her biographer and sycophant) had been instated instead -- "it is Desmond or no interview," Mother had told Doordarshan (Indian television).

Datta-Ray also talks of an incident that happened during a flight from Bangkok to Calcutta where Mother came down from the first class cabin to ask him if he could help get her nuns "white passports" -- these are passports that are given to middle ranking Indian officials to make travel easier for them.

Another anecdote Datta-Ray tells is one when the head of the British Council in Calcutta took a titled Englishwoman to see Mother Teresa, but mentioned her title only in passing. Six months later, Mother telephoned the aristocrat in London from Rome, calling her by her correct title, and asked her if she could use one of her houses in a up-market area of London to put up some of her nuns.

Datta-Ray describes Mother Teresa as anything but publicity shy. During his long tenure as the editor of The Statesman, Mother Teresa used to send him regular messengers (usually a pair of her nuns) with little notes about some programme or the other she was embarking on. Datta-Ray also told me of an incident recounted to him by the (late) Subroto Basak, who used to represent Associated Press in Calcutta. One day, Calcutta's local journalists went to see Mother Teresa about some topical issue, but were told at the door that no meeting would be possible because she had suddenly taken ill. When Basak sent in his AP card, he was immediately ushered in.(21)

It may come a surprise to people to know that Mother Teresa used to vote in elections in India in the 1960s and 70s. As the main opponents in West Bengal have always been the Marxists and Congress, it is not difficult to surmise who she voted for. Indeed, her official biographer Egan describes an incident where a Marxist in Calcutta, on noting the indelible ink mark on her finger (that is stamped on voters in India on the casting of the vote to prevent impersonation) had remarked that perhaps, as a saintly nun, she should be above party politics.(22)

Latterly she herself had stopped voting, but made it absolutely sure that each and every one of her nuns and novices went out to cast her vote on election day. As recently as 1991, she was writing to West Bengal's Chief Election Commissioner to protest at the exclusion of a number of her nuns in Calcutta's electoral register.(23) I was somewhat surprised to see the Catholic weekly The Universe (24) print a photograph (with the caption "Nun So Certain"!) of a long crocodile of Mother Teresa's nuns patiently waiting to vote outside an election booth in Calcutta during the Indian elections of March 1998.

It is not that the nuns are given a free choice in vote -- like in every other matter within the closed and hierarchical world of the Missionaries of Charity, instructions came from the top as to who to vote for.

I have no problems with Mother Teresa, an Indian citizen, voting in an Indian election. There is nothing unusual about nuns voting -- in countries like Ireland or Italy it is a familiar sight to find long queues of nuns patiently waiting outside polling stations.

But Mother Teresa (and the media) should have spared us the wide-eyed bewilderment whenever the word "politics" was mentioned. I am afraid the evidence does not match the affectation.

 

                                                    NOTES 

1, 3.  Egan, E., Such A Vision Of The Street, Mother Teresa, London, 1985, p.406, p. 345

2. Gonzalez-Balado, J., Loving Jesus Mother Teresa, London 1991, p. 46

4. Szulc, T., Pope Paul II The Biography, New York, 1995, p. 479

5. Catholic News Service, USA, 30 May 1996

6. Ms., August 1972, pp. 84 & 88

7., 8. Holden, W., Unlawful Carnal Knowledge The True Story of the Irish X Case London, 1994, p. 114

9. Sunday Independent, Dublin, 26 November 1995

10. Ladies Home Journal, New York, 1 April 1996

11. Sunday Independent, Dublin,1 October 1995

12. United Press International, 22 October 1984

13. National Prayer Breakfast, Washington D.C., 3 February 1994

14. The Tablet, London, 12 September 1998, p. 1184

15. Tully, M., Mother, Hong Kong, 1992, p. 91

16. New York Times, New York, 4 June 1981

17. Time, 4 December, 1989

18. Egan, E., Such A Vision of the Street, London, 1985, p. 405

19. Asian Age, London, 25 November 1995

20. Ibid., 2 December 1995

21. Author's interview with Sunanda K Datta-Ray, 14 December 1997

22. Egan, E., Such A Vision of the Street, London, 1985, p. 452

23. Prabashi Anandabazaar, Calcutta, 4 October 1997

24. The Universe, Manchester, UK, 8 March 1998

 

[Source: http://website.lineone.net/~bajuu/CHAP10.htm ]