THE HINDU, January 19, 2010 02:08 IST
PTI
Mother Teresa invariably prefixed
"my friend" before she took Jyoti Basu's name.
Asked what he, a Communist
and atheist, could possibly have in common with Mother Teresa for whom God was
everything, Jyoti Basu said with a smile: “We both share a love for the poor.”
The Hindu requested Navin B. Chawla, Chief
Election Commissioner of India and Mother Teresa’s biographer, to share his
insights into the remarkable friendship between Jyoti Basu and the founder of
the Missionaries of Charity:
During the course of writing a
biography on Mother Teresa, I asked Chief Minister Jyoti Basu what he, a
Communist and atheist, could possibly have in common with Mother Teresa for
whom God was everything. With a smile that reached his eyes, he said: “We both
share a love for the poor.” For her part, Mother Teresa invariably prefixed the
words “My friend” before she took his name.
From the legendary Chief Minister
of West Bengal, Dr. B.C. Roy, who first recognised her work, to the equally
legendary Jyoti Basu who was always available to her when she needed him,
Mother Teresa’s work in the city that was beloved of her, could not have been
possible to the extent it was without their understanding and their support. It
is not that the Missionaries of Charity did not spread their wings to almost
600 centres in 123 countries around the world. It is that Kolkata was her
epicentre, the city she identified as her home.
On one occasion when Mother Teresa
was visiting Delhi, she fell ill and had to be admitted to a city hospital. For
a week that she was there, I was at her bedside and also became her link to the
besieged hospital switchboard; there were no mobile phones in those days. With
unfailing regularity, Jyoti Basu rang each day to enquire after her health.
When I once told him that she repetitively said to me, “Let me go back to
Kolkata, I will be all right there,” he laughed understandingly.
On another occasion, when she was
admitted to the Woodlands Nursing Home in Kolkata, I saw him enter without
fuss, meet Doctor Bardhan and the Sisters, make an enquiry and quietly leave.
One of Mother Teresa’s senior-most companions, Sister Gertrude, said to me: “He
does not miss a single day.”
In turn, whenever he was unwell,
she would visit him in the nursing home or at his house, say a prayer and
leave. The good wishes of the one and the prayers of the other complemented
each other both in sickness and in health.
On one of my visits to Kolkata,
Mother Teresa asked me whether I had been to Tengra. She explained that the
Chief Minister had asked her to take charge of about 400 women inmates of the
Kolkata jail, many of whom had been undertrials for long years; others were
mentally ill. In her practical way, she asked him for some land. He gave her
about 11 acres in Tengra, near the leather tanneries.
When I visited it, she had already
created a haven of peace and tranquillity. Just four of her Sisters had taken
charge. The women were finally at peace. Tengra was a visible demonstration
that both spoke the same language.
In July of 1997, when I was a mere
Joint Secretary in the government, I sought an appointment with the then
Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister; I do not know what made me do it. I
told him that Mother Teresa was very sick and did not have much time left to
live. Having nursed her once in Delhi, I had also become distantly acquainted
with the halls of power that called with unfailing regularity seeking a health
bulletin.
I knew that many of these callers
would come to her funeral, and there could be a protocol nightmare. I added that
no matter where she passed away, the Sisters would bring her to Kolkata for her
burial there. “Leave it with me,” he said adding that he would need to be in
touch with Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, as he would need to look into all the
arrangements.
She died about two months later on
September 5 that year. I was told later that Jyoti Basu had been alerted some
weeks earlier. When my family and I attended the memorial service and the
funeral in Kolkata, everything went off like clock work.
Later on, my batchmate and friend
S.N. Menon, Secretary to the Chief Minister, told me of the correspondence and
work that began at the West Bengal end. During the first part of the actual
ceremony, where religious rites were also being administered, Jyoti Basu chose
not to be present. Like a good communist, he entered at exactly the moment when
these ended, and the civic part of the ceremony began. But I saw his imprint in
every last detail.
And when at the very last, the
Missionaries of Charity Sisters asked for special permission to bury Mother
Teresa at Motherhouse, her headquarters at Acharya Jagdish Chandra Bose Road,
that permission too he accorded.
He gave his friend Mother Teresa a
befitting farewell.
