The National People’s Party said it will urge the Meghalaya government to write to the states concerned seeking action to prevent such attacks.
The National People’s Party, an ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party, has expressed concern about harassment, intimidation and vandalism against Christian communities across several states during the Christmas season, The Shillong Times reported on Friday.
Several incidents of attacks on Christians or disruptions to Christmas celebrations were reported in December across the country including in Chhattisgarh’s Raipur, Assam’s Nalbari, Madhya Pradesh’s Jabalpur, Kerala’s Palakkad, Uttarakhand’s Haridwar and Delhi.
In this backdrop, the NPP’s Meghalaya working president Hamletson Dohling said the party would urge the Meghalaya government to write to the state governments concerned, seeking serious action to prevent such attacks.
“We strongly condemn these incidents and assert that they must not recur,” Dohling said. “We do not accept and cannot tolerate such incidents.”
He added that he had conveyed the organisation’s concerns directly to party chief and Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma.
He also warned that unchecked actions by extremists could erode the country’s secular fabric, The Shillong Times reported.
The Nagaland Baptist Church Council also wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday expressing “grave concern” and “deep regret” over what it described as an increase in attacks on Christians across the country, particularly during the Christmas season, and urged his intervention, the Morung Express reported.
The council cited data from the United Christians Forum recording more than 600 incidents of violence between January and October, including mob assaults, public humiliation, church disruptions and demolition of homes.
Signed by senior office-bearers of the church council, the letter said it was a “bitter irony” that in what it called the world’s largest democracy, people were being attacked for celebrating Christmas, and stated that the freedom to practise one’s faith appeared increasingly distant, according to the Morung Express.
In a similar vein, the Guwahati-based North East Catholic Research Forum, an NGO comprising Catholic scholars and social workers from the North East, has urged Modi to express his disapproval of the attacks on Christians, The Telegraph reported.
It said that these attacks were not stray incidents, but were “well-planned and systematically executed incidents by organisation(s) who had (no) qualms about naming or identifying the organisation they belonged to”.
However, the BJP’s Meghalaya unit rejected claims that minorities were unsafe under governments led by the party.
State BJP general secretary Wankitbok Pohshna said the party did not condone violence against any religious group and claimed that minority communities had benefited from government policies.
He highlighted that swift action, including arrests, had been taken in reported cases and described those involved as fringe elements whose actions should not be generalised, the Shillong Times reported.
