For Immediate Release

For further information, contact Dr. John Dayal

[The following was issued on behalf of the All India Christian Council by its Secretary General, Dr. John Dayal, on the results of the General Elections to the Lok Sabha, the House of the Peoples of the India Parliament. The results were declared today after five rounds of voting which began on 16 April and ended 13 May 2009, involving an electorate of over 714 million. The results gave the Congress, currently in power, approximately 203 seats in the 543 member House, and its United Progressive Alliance 260 seats, with the National Democratic Alliance led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) getting 163, the BJP itself scoring 121, and the Left Front 24.]

NEW DELHI, 16 May 2009 -- The All India Christian Council salutes the people of India for the consummate and decisive manner in which they have rejected divisive, communal, and sectarian political forces in the General Elections results which were declared today. Their vote for secularism, stability, and development imposes on the party they have trusted with their mandate, the Indian National Congress (INC), and the architects of its victory, party president Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and General Secretary Mr. Rahul Gandhi, the important responsibility of restoring national political discourse and governance to the pristine values as inscribed in the Constitution and articulated by the country’s founding fathers.

We hope the national leaders of the INC Party and the government will correct the aberrations that crept in after 1991 leading to the demolition of the secular fabric of the country, untold misery to the people, unprecedented bloodshed and massacres of religious minorities.  We also hope that the government will build on its policies to wage a winning war on poverty, and to ensure food, clothing, and shelter to the vast number of people below the poverty line. This will also demand an unceasing war on corruption and graft, and sincerity in devolution of resources to the countryside and for urban regeneration.

The lessons have been learnt by winners and losers alike, we hope. India’s billion and a quarter people want human dignity and progress, brotherhood, and justice. They abhor hate-mongering and narrow self interest under the pretext of ideology. Above all, the people, especially women and youth, across the country have shown that they share a hope in the nation’s future, shunning despair and cynicism in the midst of an economic cataclysm.

We therefore hope we will never again have to see a Gujarat 2002, or a Kandhamal 2007-2008, that farmer’s suicides will cease, and that women will be safe in their homes and on the streets of our cities.

For the Christian community, hope increases that the rapists, killers and arsonists of Orissa's Kandhamal and perpetrators in Karnataka will be brought to justice, that our development agenda and our cry for development -- articulated in the manifestos we gave to the political parties on the eve of the General Elections -- will be fulfilled. The Christian community needs special economic and development resources from the government and should not be relegated to the margins because of its unwavering commitment to peace or because it does not always articulate politically its genuine needs.  Dalit Christians look forward to a realisation of their 50-year-old search for equal rights, promised often but yet to be given.

The All India Christian Council warmly congratulates the INC Party and the new government that will take shape in the next few days. The Council extends its full cooperation in efforts at national integration, human rights, the emancipation of Dalits, and human dignity. It also congratulates those who have won for the BJP, the Left, and the Third and Fourth Fronts. Each Member of Parliament has a God given duty to work for the common man. We pray God will bless them abundantly.

God bless India.

The All India Christian Council (www.aiccindia.org), birthed in 1998, exists to protect and serve the Christian community, minorities, and the oppressed castes. The aicc is a coalition of thousands of Indian denominations, organizations, and lay leaders.

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