Design to undermine missionaries’ role in northeast: Church leaders

Guwahati, July 31, 2019: Church leaders in the north-eastern region have accused the present federal government of trying to undermine the role of missionaries in spreading quality education in the country.

“Not a single word about the significant contributions of Christian missionaries in providing and making quality education accessible to maximum number of people has been mentioned in the entire voluminous draft New Education Policy (NEP) 2019.

The development has shocked the entire Christian community. We, in the Northeast, have reasons enough to suspect that there is an inherent design in the NEP to spell doom the contributions of missionaries towards education,” Allen Brooks, spokesperson of Assam Christian Forum told The Sentinel on July 27.

The Assam Christian Forum on July 26 convened an emergent meeting in the city to express anxiety over the haste in which the Central Government is trying to impose an unstudied and unreflected education policy on the people of India.

“The Church Leaders felt that little respect is being shown to the autonomy of individual States and to their concern for preserving their identity and cultural heritage. They felt that there is a planned strategy to homogenise the Indian society, ignoring regional diversity and inherited ways of passing on the heirloom of centuries to the next generation,” Brooks said.

Brooks added that the Church leaders also felt that a carefully formulated strategy was in play to undermine the immense contribution of their community in the field of education. He alleged the NEP 2019 will weaken the efforts of minority groups and smaller communities to lift themselves up from their humbler positions.

“If implemented, the NEP-2019 will ensure that no one from the lower ranks will ever be able to go beyond their assigned level,” he said. The Friday’s meeting was attended by leaders from the Catholic Church, Church of North India, Council of Baptist Churches of North East India, Presbyterian Church of India, Lutheran Church, and the EFI among others.

(sentinelassam)