Ranchi 'baby trafficking': Mamata accuses BJP of maligning Missionaries of Charity

KOLKATA: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of making ‘malicious attempts to malign the name of Missionaries of Charity after two staff members if its shelter home were arrested for allegedly selling babies.

The reference was to the arrests last week of a staffer and a nun from the organisation's shelter home Nirmal Hriday in Ranchi. Jharkhand Police said there were at least four cases in which babies were sold for Rs 1.2 lakh each, but the Roman Catholic church has rejected the allegations.

Banerjee on Thursday tweeted, “Mother Teresa herself set up Missionaries of Charity. And now they are also not being spared. Malicious attempts to malign their name. The Sisters are being targeted. BJP wants to spare no one. Highly condemnable. Let MOC continue to do their work for the poorest of the poor.”


A day earlier, the Catholic Church came out in support of the arrested nun with the Ranchi Bishop, according to a report on NDTV, saying her confession was extracted under pressure.

Bishop Theodore Mascarenhas, secretary general of the Catholic Bishop's Conference of India tweeted:"This is a deliberate attempt to malign one of the world’s and India’s most loved institutions, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. The truth will come out."

Police on Thursday said three of the babies 'sold' from the shelter home were traced and rescued and that a search for the fourth kid was on.

The arrests took place after the Chairperson of Ranchi unit of Child Welfare Committee (CWC) Rupa Verma filed a complaint against the Nirmal Hriday staffers for allegedly selling an infant boy to a UP-based couple. In her complaint, she alleged that a couple from UP's Shone Bhadra district approached the CWC after Nirmal Hriday allegedly took away the child they had given them on May 14.