Jharkhand police arrested a woman and detained two nuns of ‘Missionaries of Charity’ running ‘Nirmal Hriday’ – a shelter home for destitute women, a trust founded by Nobel laureate Mother Teresa, for allegedly selling the infants born to unwed mothers at the institution.
Kotwali police station officer-in-charge Shyamanand Mandal said that an FIR was lodged under section 370 of IPC, and three people were detained for interrogation. As confirmed by Mandal one women staff, named Anima Indwar amongst the detained, have already been arrested and one nun against whom the police had substantial evidence would be arrested soon, said the officer-in-charge. SN Mandal confirmed that Rs 65000 has been recovered from Anima.
“It was found during the course of the investigation that they were selling of unwed mothers at Rs 50,000 to 1.5 lakh. At least four children have been illegally sold by them,” said Mandal
The FIR was lodged after Child Welfare Committee (CWC) of Ranchi went for a regular inspection and found a child gone missing from the institution.
According to CWC Chairperson Rupa Kumari, a couple Saurabh Kumar Agrawal and Preeti Agrawal from Sonbhadra in Uttar Pradesh had a deal with Anima. The child was born in the institution on 1st May and was sold to them on 14th May for an amount of 1.2 lacs. However, Anima called them again in the last week of June and asked to come to Ranchi for some legal formalities. When the couple came to Ranchi Anima dodged them and took the child.
Kumari said after the couple was unable to trace Anima who had fled with the sold child they went to CWC where the matter was disclosed. When the CWC investigated the matter they came to know about the racket. It was also found that three more kids were sold by Anima and others. Police raided the shelter home at East Jail Road with Child Welfare Committee and rescued 13 pregnant women to be shifted to probation home.
Social activist Baidnath Kumar said Missionaries of Charity had stopped adoption from their organizations way back in 2015. However, the Missionaries of Charity’s Jail Road chapter was still involved in rendering these illegal services involving human trafficking. To carry out these activities this wing gave shelter to unwed pregnant mothers who had no place to give birth to these unwanted newborns and then, in turn, sold the babies.
Mother Teresa, the Nobel laureate, founder of the ‘Missionaries of Charity’, was often referred to as ‘Saint Teresa of Calcutta’, but for her critics, she was anything but a saint.
According to Dr Arup Chatterjee author of “Mother Teresa, the final verdict”, the first common misconception among people is that Teresa “cured” or “helped cure” the sick and diseased. This is denied by the author. Her “Home for the Dying“, “had no doctors saving lives, but it was a place for victims to suffer and die, by the rules of the Catholic church“.
Dr Chatterjee further states that “Mother Teresa’s order was to not provide proper beds, but just little hammocks. There is a communal toilet where people have to defecate in presence of each other and the inmates are not allowed visits from their friends and relatives“. According to facts reproduced by Dr Chatterjee, two things remain quite clear; Religion played a major role in her work, and she did not necessarily work to remove suffering, as is generally portrayed.
