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DELHI, INDIA, August 12, 2002: This BBC article states, “Mother Teresa of Calcutta has been voted the greatest Indian since the country’s independence in 1947 in an Indian magazine survey. The top ten Indians are: Mother Teresa, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Indira Gandhi, JRD Tata, BR Ambedkar, Dhibhai Ambani, Sachin Tendulkar, Jayaprakash Narayan and Atal Behari Vajpayee. She was the only one on the list not an Indian by birth, and led the tally in most of the states in India and across all age groups in the survey carried out by leading English-language magazine, Outlook. Mother Teresa was ranked ahead of independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, as well as front-line independence leader Sardar Vallabhai Patel, who was instrumental in getting the princely states to join the Indian Union. “The response was beyond anything we had imagined,” an editorial in the magazine said. The responses kept flooding in over e-mail, fax and snail mail till the last minute.” Respondents who are 60 years and above seem to be more cynical about Mother Teresa’s contribution than the rest. The poll did not include the leader of India’s freedom struggle, Mahatma Gandhi, because the magazine decided “to keep the father of the nation above a voting process.” The BBC fails to critique the poll, which was not a random sampling, but a request for readers to respond. It was therefore subject to “ballot-box stuffing.” There is no way to determine if this result reflects the views of Indians. The decision to eliminate Gandhi, who plausibly would have won, is questionable. But the BBC reports this results as fact, failing to point out these weaknesses, or that the magazine, Outlook, is a Marxist-oriented publication.

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