Morung Express News
September 9
Kohima: The Nagaland Pradesh Congress Committee has expressed its dismay over what it has termed as ‘the irresponsible and misleading statements’ of Pramod Mahajan, General Secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party during his visit to Dimapur on September 8. “The NPCC understands his total frustration about the sorry state of affairs of the BJP at the National level, which is collapsing like a house of cards,” stated a release issued by Taka Masa Ao, MLA and spokesman of the NPCC. Masa has remarked that Mahajan’s allegations against the UPA Government were figments of his imagination. It is nothing but an outburst to gain cheap political mileage and which has totally exposed his ignorance about the ongoing political dialogue, the release further stated. While saying that it was the then Congress Prime Minister Narasimha Rao who had declared for the first time that the Naga political issue was a political problem and it should be approached through human approaches, the spokesperson has said that it was the then Congress Government who had successfully facilitated the two Ceasefire agreements between the GoI and the NSCN (I-M) in 1997 and with the NSCN-K in the year 2000. Reposing its faith on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress Chairperson Sonia Gandhi, the NPCC has stated that it was after the UPA Government had come to power at the Centre that the political dialogue had been upgraded from the bureaucratic level to the political level with the constitution of a Ministerial team to negotiate with the leaders of the NSCN-IM. “If at all, the Peace Process is derailed as stated by Mahajan, the Nagaland public should be informed as to how it was derailed and why,” Masa has stated.
On the problem of illegal influx of Bangladeshis, the MLA has questioned Mahajan on why he had not undertaken any steps in solving the problem when he was a Minister at the Union Cabinet.
While stressing on the utilization of the Rs 365 crore peace bonus that the centre had gifted to Nagaland, the NPCC has decried that the White papers tabled by former Nagaland Finance Minister Kewekhape Therie and Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio were not satisfactory as the facts and figures do not tally. The NPCC has further stated during the NDA’s Government’s reign at the Centre there had been numerous atrocities committed against minorities in different parts of the country such as the burning alive of Graham Staines and his sons.
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