Missionaries of Charities was started by the Mother Teresa in 1950 , who been revered as the people’s saint, long before she won the Nobel peace Prize, was bestowed India’s highest civil honour, the Bharat Ratna, and then canonised a Saint of the Catholic Church
BJP led Union government Minstry of Home Affairs ( MHA) non renewal would automatically mean that after midnight of 31st December.,
That is on the dawn on 1st January 2022 the organisation would have no funds to operate its large number of children and old people’s homes which also employ thousands of Indian women and men workers in various occupations.
This is the first time the FCRA has not been renewed. The community hopes, together with the Sisters, that the government will renew the FCRA soon.
Pope Francis has been invited by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit India next year, and this could be a major public relations disaster for the Indian leader.
The government panicked when it realised that the unthoughtful, in fact cruel, order had triggered mass outrage in India and the world.
International news agencies and India’s free press and its social media ensured that the news had gone viral.
The chief minister of the state of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, who knew the Mother well, tweeted her strong condemnation of the Modi government’s action.
After an initial silence, the government of Prime minister Narendra Modi admitted that it had not approved the renewal without which the Catholic organisation will have no money to function next year.
The damage to the government’s image perhaps would have been a little less if it had said the licence was not renewed because of faulty accounting, procedural errors, or other issues. where as Union Government led by BJP chose to remain silent.
The outrage was swift, first from Catholic activists and then from political quarters. The attempt at damage control by Union Government was non diplomatic as always.
First came a note issued by Mother Superior Prema which said, inter alia,
“We would like to clarify that the FCRA registration has been neither suspended nor cancelled. We have been informed that our FCRA renewal application has not been approved.
Therefore, as a measure to ensure that there is no lapse, we have asked our centres not to operate any of the FCRA accounts until the matter is resolved.”
The Press Information Bureau of the union government issued a statement saying the “State Bank of India informed that the Missionaries of Charity itself sent a request to SBI to freeze its accounts.
But as on date No request / revision application has been received from Missionaries of Charity for review of refusal of renewal.”
It does not take the brains of Mathematician Ramanujar or Gravity discovered Newton or Notable scientists Thomas Alva Edision to see how the two statements play out.
TMC leader O’Brien was quite right in dismissing the Union government statement as a damage control exercise.
This refusal of the government to renew the FCRA citing “adverse remarks” stigmatises not just the institutions of the Missionaries of Charity but the name of Mother St Teresa,
The Mother St Teresa had anyway been a target of vilification by the Sangh Parivar, the ideological parent of the Bharatiya Janata party which is in power in India with Narendra Modi as Prime minister.
In Modi era as PM even in the past, police and Union government regulators had tried to arrest Missionaries of Charity sisters on such charges as trafficking in children. But in the end All charges were proved false.
With this non renewal the Union government led by BJP a right wing Hindutva group (RSS backed) and the right wing activitsts are also seemingly sending a message to the Christian community.
