Mother Teresa or India???

Criticisms leveled against Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity include:

Poor medical care in her hospices: Numerous visitors, including doctors and former volunteers, reported on the substandard and unhygienic conditions in her homes for the sick and dying. A 1994 documentary by Christopher Hitchens and journalist Tariq Ali, Hell's Angel, included eyewitness testimony detailing the unsanitary practice of reusing needles without proper sterilization.

There were embarrassing questions about the quality of medical care at the Missionaries of Charity’s facilities. Former volunteers spoke of sub-standard sanitary conditions, an absence of medical professionals and a reluctance to treat pain. Even patients suffering from the most serious and painful illnesses received little more than aspirin to relieve suffering.

In 2013, a group of University of Montreal academics concluded that the missionary cared for the sick “by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it.” Teresa, it was said, asked volunteers to convince patients that through pain and suffering, they would get closer to Jesus.

Ironically, while many of the sick in her own facilities died from curable diseases, Teresa went to Europe for treatment when she faced her own health complications.

Such conditions at her facilities were hardly the result of lack of financing. But in 1991, Germany’s Stern magazine reported that only slightly more than seven percent of the donations to Mother Teresa’s organization was spent on charity. Most was managed by Vatican and was untraceable, it said.

Withholding pain medication: Critics claim that patients in her facilities were often denied powerful, yet inexpensive, pain-relieving medication. This was attributed to Teresa's belief that suffering was a virtuous path to becoming closer to God. While her followers embraced this philosophy, Teresa herself received medical care at modern, well-equipped Western hospitals.

• Suspicious handling of funds: Despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, including from notorious figures like Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and convicted fraudster Charles Keating, critics allege that the vast majority of the money was never accounted for. Some reports claim that much of the money went to the Vatican instead of to improving conditions in her facilities.

• Condemnation of abortion and contraception: Consistent with strict Catholic dogma, Mother Teresa used her platform to speak out against abortion, contraception, and divorce. During her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, she famously declared abortion to be "the greatest destroyer of peace in the world".
• Forced baptisms: In India, critics allege that some sisters of her order would secretly baptize dying patients, including non-Christians. 

A view from India

She was misinterpreted

We have a inferiority complex, once a white person come to India, we automatically believe him/her to be a holy saint, even when they are not.

In very few successful civilizations would you see a missionary organization getting as much traction and respect as it got in India.

Mother Teresa was playing from the team of Vatican City from the first day. And we were happy to be fooled and looted, just like centuries prior to this event.

She was an amazing employee for Vatican though, we can learn a lot from that. She found a nation that has a void due to pathetic government ecosystem and she made the most out of this opportunity. She got herself a Nobel prize for services to the western world, and Indians were cheering the loudest, even today, it’s taught in Indian schools that she was amongst the few Indians who won Nobel.

Overall, she was an episode of Indian inferiority complex and our failure to see obvious red flags. This happened because we didn’t take enough pride in our identity and were divided amongst ourselves. This outlook of complete ignorance of one’s society and civic sense is the reason that India continues to face similar problems in other states as well, but Bengal has been an epitome in all senses.

Just see the current case that has shook the nation from Bengal, instead of questioning authorities, we have allowed Mamta Banerjee to become a hero in public eye by leading a march against her own government?

We clean our roads and repair them immediately when a politician visits some place, when in fact it’s their own duty to have this done throughout the state, what kind of mindset is this?

Regardless, Mother Teresa wasn’t a fraud. Indian society itself is a fraud, which she benefitted immensely from. As long as we keep evading our responsibilities as a society, such people will keep coming and benefitting from us.

But rest assured that Mother Teresa had no good intentions towards India, nor does the people benefiting from the Indian market in most cases.

The debate surrounding Mother Teresa cannot be divorced from the socio-political landscape of India. The country, with its complex tapestry of poverty, caste, and religious dynamics, presents a challenging environment for any charitable endeavor. Critics argue that Mother Teresa's work, while well-intentioned, may have inadvertently reinforced certain societal structures rather than challenging them.

Caste System: Some argue that her focus on the poorest of the poor did not address the systemic issues of the caste system, which continues to marginalize certain groups in Indian society.

Religious Undertones: Her Catholic faith and the religious nature of her work have led to accusations of proselytization, raising concerns about the secular nature of charitable work in a diverse society.