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Minorities panel chief blasts Centre

The National Commission for Minorities has charged the Centre with neglecting the grievances of the Christian minorities.

Addressing the media, NCM Chairman Tahir Mahmood said that a final report on the violence against Christians in Gujarat would be submitted to President K R Narayanan on February 1.

He regretted that, despite repeated reports, neither had the Centre nor the Gujarat government done enough to stop the ongoing violence against Christians.

''The Gujarat government has all along painted a rosy picture, but they have not done enough to protect the minorities,'' he alleged and regretted that the commission was not taken into confidence by the Centre in the entire controversy.

''There has been a belief amongst the criminals that going by the religious policy of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government at the Centre, they can go scot-free by targeting a particular section,'' he said, adding that the minorities were ''unsafe'' in the past one year in the country.

He said the commission had been getting disturbing reports of violence against Christians from March 1998. ''From April last year, we have been getting serious complaints and by August we got fed up and decided to institute a fact-finding mission,'' he said, adding that the report was accepted by the Gujarat government in toto.

But the Gujarat government sat on the report as the vandals went on to burn Bibles, desecrate churches and even exhumed a body near Bharuch. ''Even Christian priests were humiliated,'' he claimed.

The fact-finding report did not identify the group deliberately, he added.

Disgusted by the inaction of the Gujarat government, the commission constituted a judicial bench to inquire the entire incident. The final report would be submitted on February 1 to the President, he said.

He was at pain to explain that the government should be in touch with the commission in this hour of crisis when the Christians were targeted in Gujarat, Orissa and even in Karnataka.

UNI

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