NE christians flay miniroty panel's report

GUWAHATI, Feb 19: The Christian community in the North-east has strongly reacted to the reported statement of the chairman of the National Commission for Minorities and alleged that the Commission, which was formed to safeguard the rights and interests of minorities, undermined its image. In a letter to the chairman of the Commission, Rev Thomas Menamparampil, Archbishop of Guwahati, Rev Ngul Khan Pau, general secretary of the Council of Baptist Churches, North-east India, Bishop Thomas Pullopilil, Allan Brooks of Catholic Council of India and Rev George Plathottam, President of the South Asian Catholic Press Association, expressed serious concern regarding the reported statement of the Commission chairman at Kochi where he had said that there had been abnormally high growth of Christian population in the North-east, particularly in the areas bordering Bangladesh. The memorandum further pointed out that the Commission never contacted the Church leaders of the North-east to verify the facts before making the statement.The memorandum said that the Commission, while discussing the census data pertaining to Christian community, used the data selectively, which raised a false alarm. The letter pointed out that it is common knowledge that the districts like Dhubri and Karimganj have very few Christians and a Christian family bringing up four children would result in 200 per cent growth. By the same yardstick, the Hindu population would show alarmingly high percentage of growth in places like Aizawl, Shillong, Kohima etc. The letter said that any study on growth should be carried out giving due attention to the ground realities.The Christian leaders of the North-east questioned the motives of the Commission in holding a seminar on the issue without any representation from the North-east and expressed their reservations about the hypothesis put forward by Prof Ashis Bose of the Expert Committee on Census data on religion. The data must be studied in the light of prevailing socio-cultural, ethnic and economic factors and merely citing data of growth percentage in selected pockets can be misleading, the letter added. The letter further said that any analysis should also take into consideration the phenomenon of migration of people from one place to other for various reasons.The Christian leaders alleged that several newspapers of the region had carried out biased reports of the seminar, thereby misleading the people.The leaders demanded that the Commission should send a full report on what transpired at the seminar at Kochi. They also demanded that the Commission chairman and members should refrain from making such statements and issue a clarification in this regard immediately.