Dear defenders of Mohan Bhagwat, Mother Teresa's critic Hitchens would have hated RSS as well

Aah the unbearable rightness of being white. Christopher Hitchens was always an outspoken writer, the kind who could raise hackles wherever he went with his acerbic opinions. But now he’s proving a great asset to those trying to defend Mohan Bhagwat on Mother Teresa. Luckily for them Hitchens once really ripped apart Mother Teresa’s halo in his Missionary Position and now the internet is flooded with links to his Hell’s Angel video of Kolkata’s fabled saint. Hitchens has become the great white shield behind whom Mohan Bhagwat can take shelter. Or perhaps he is conveniently the great white Mother Teresa-eating shark who can do Bhagwat’s work for him. @IndiaSpeaksPR tweets “The most tragic part of the Mother Teresa debate will be how we continue to refer to Mr. Hitchens’ work.” The sudden right-wing rush to the side of Christopher Hitchens bears all the signs of utmost relief at finding a stamp of approval from The Big White Man. “It is funny how Bhakts who know how to read and write only 140 characters quote Hitchens’ book ,” tweets journalist @KunalMajumder.   [caption id=“attachment_2122493” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Reuters.[/caption] When you disagree with the Big White Man then he is an old-fashioned imperialist. But when you agree with him, his opinion becomes the gold standard. In fact, Hitchens’ take-down on Mother Teresa owed much to the work of Aroup Chatterjee who once worked briefly in Mother Teresa’s homes before becoming disillusioned with her. But Aroup Chatterjee who himself wrote a book called Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict does not carry as much name-dropping weight as the Hitch. Arun Shourie has also come down on Mother Teresa but you’ll see a lot more of Hitchens being thrown around than homegrown Shourie. But as Hartosh Singh Bal tweets, “Heel bhakts heel. I enjoyed hitchens’ on M. Teresa. Just want you to know his skepticism of dispassionate service is doubly true of the RSS.” And he is backed up by Utsav Chakravarty aka @SatanBhagat who tweets “People quoting Hitchens while defending #RSSQuestionsTeresa, not realizing that Hitchens would’ve hated RSS just as much if not more.” After all Hitchens once described himself as a Marxist and a socialist. And even though after 9/11 even in 2010 he still called himself a Marxist. And while his Missionary Position brought him much infamy, he was, the RSS should note, no friend of religion as a whole. His book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything was a New York Times bestseller. And the RSS should note he takes potshots at all religions, not just the three Abrahamic ones. He thought even the word “atheist” was not strong enough to convey what he felt. He was a champion of the word “antitheist” instead. He would have been richly amused by the irony of his words being used to defend the RSS chief in India. And it would have been delicious to see what he made of it. Many liberals meanwhile, for whom the outspoken Hitchens was a god of sorts, are mute, unsure of what to do when their god has been pressed into service by the other side. But that is of course the hallmark of a true liberal. A true liberal is a thorn on all sides and denounces all kinds of bigotry. And honestly his takedown of Mother Teresa was so vicious, Bhagwat appears as comedian @MojoRojo says almost “like a love letter in comparison.”

“Her service would have been good but it used to have one objective, to see that the person who was being helped felt obliged to become a Christian. The question is not about conversion but if this (conversion) is done in the name of service, then that service gets devalued. In our country, service is neutral.”

That is hardly “right wing hate” no matter what Arnab Goswami thinks. Mother Teresa was a missionary, in the service of Jesus, spreading his message and she made no bones about it. She said, “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people." If that raised the hackles of Hitchens, what would he have made of ghar wapsi either? Or the fact as Shoaib Daniyal writes in Scroll that “just like Mother Teresa, for these RSS institutions, social work is only a way to effect conversions ‒ in this case, to Hinduism (Hindukaran). These institutions push Hindu religious customs zealously, encouraging adivasis to replace their animism and ancestor worship with reverance for mainstream Hindu gods. Emphasis is also placed on the conversion of Christian adivasis to Hinduism. In RSS: Widening Horizons, an RSS publication, the origins of the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram clearly mention that the institution will work to bring ‘converts back to the Hindu fold’." The danger of pressing Hitchens to your service is that it might just come back to bite you. By the way those spouting Hitchens in their defence should also note that in his diatribe against Mother Teresa he didn’t just stop at attacking her motivations. He said she has a “face like a cake left out in the rain” and called her “Mama Cow.” He is not the most gentlemanly of critics. The problem with Bhagwat’s criticism is not that it is wrong. Just because the Vatican wants to make her a saint does not put Mother Teresa beyond criticism or questioning. Modi who wants to reassure minorities is probably not pleased with the timing of Bhagwat’s remark and Meenakshi Lekhi is tying herself into knots trying to both defend it and distance the BJP from it. “I am no one to justify. Who am I to justify Mr. Bhagwat? Government has nothing to do with what Mohan-ji said.” Lekhi tells the media even as she quotes Mother Teresa’s own words to prove that Bhagwat was not saying anything indefensible. But it puts the government on the backfoot as Derek O’Brien says, “Now what will the pinstripe suit say to the khaki shorts about his views on Mother Teresa. Condemn. Condemn. Condemn.” And the Shiv Sena does not help Modi’s balancing act when it writes an editorial to “congratulate” Bhagwat for speaking the “bitter truth” that “Mother Teresa’s real motive was to convert people to Christianity". The real problem with Bhagwat is just that it cavalierly reduces Mother Teresa’s life’s work to being a bean counter for converted souls like a salesman racking up sales. The essayist Richard Rodriguez wrote in response to Hitchens:

“Mr. Hitchens revealed that the woman popularly regarded as a saint had extended her begging bowl under the noses of corrupt men and women; she laundered money to serve the unwashed. I had always assumed saints are tainted, as most of us are tainted. Graham Greene taught me that holiness must dwell in a tarnished temple. (There is no other kind.)”

Mother Teresa became famous worldwide not just because she was able to convert souls but because she did pick up the dying from the streets and washed the lepers and Mario d’Penha is correct when he tweets,“Have Hitchens or Bhagwat ever cared for a leper, cleaned her sores, allowed her dignity in life & death? That is what love calls us to do.” Sometimes it’s just best to let sleeping saints lie. And the same holds true for dead polemicists as well.