Vadodra District Social Defence Officer Mayank Trivedi visited the Missionaries of Charity in the Makarpura area on December 9 and found Hindu girls were ‘forced’ to read Christian religious text and participate in prayers.
Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in the Makarpura area in Gujarat has been booked for conversion. The FIR has been lodged in the Makarpura police station based on a complaint by the District Social Defence Officer Mayank Trivedi.
The Chairman of the Child Welfare Committee of Vadodra and the District Social Defence Officer visited the premises of the Makarpura Missionaries of Charity on December 9. Mr. Trivedi found that the Hindu girls living in the premises were forced to read Christian religious texts and were also forced to participate in Christian prayers.
“Between February 10, 2021, and December 9, 2021, the institution has been involved in activities to hurt the religious sentiments of Hindus intentionally and with bitterness… The girls inside the Home for Girls are being lured to adopt Christianity by making them wear the cross around their neck and also placing the Bible on the table of the storeroom used by the girls, in order to compel them to read the Bible… It is an attempted crime to force religious conversion upon the girls,” The Indian Express quoted the FIR.
This is no isolated case of allegations against the Missionaries of Charity. In an interview with the New York Times (NYT) in 2016, London-based physician Dr. Aroup Chatterjee explained his encounters with the misdeeds of her organisation.
“Because Calcuttans think that Mother Teresa is Western, and she’s a Western icon, she’s very progressive,” he said. “And they do not associate her with miracles and mumbo jumbo and black magic just as they do not associate her with opposition to contraception and abortion,” Dr. Chatterjee told the NYT. He chronicled his experiences in the book titled “Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict”, published in 2003.
In the Vadodra case, the Assistant Commissioner of Police SB Kumavat said, “The District Collector had formed a committee after the complaint from the Child Welfare Committee. A team of members of several departments probed the allegation, following which a complaint has been filed. Police will probe the allegations and gather evidence to see if the contentions are true.”
In 2015, Sarsanghchalak Dr. Mohan Bhagwat had cautioned about the practices followed by Mother Teresa’s organisation. In a programme for the inauguration of an orphanage in Rajasthan, he said, “It’s good to work for a cause with selfless intentions. But Mother Teresa’s work had ulterior motives, which was to convert the person who was being served to Christianity.”
The Makarpura Missionaries of Charity has been booked under IPC sections 295 A (for deliberate and malicious acts to outrage feelings of any class by insulting its religious beliefs), 298 (deliberately uttering words to wound the religious feelings of a person) and the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act, 2003.
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