2nd January, 2013
Christian leaders of Nepal have complained that their numerical strength has been highly underestimated in the nation’s first census after it became a democracy.
According to a report from the World Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty Commission, the alleged manipulation in the census data – made while the nation is transitioning from a Hindu monarchy to a secular republic – is concerning.
“We can produce concrete proof of our numbers, as we have registered all our members at over 8,500 churches. We are above 2.5 million but the census of 2011 shows us to be just 300,000,” CB Gahatraj, general secretary of the Federation of National Christians of Nepal, said at a press conference in Kathmandu this month.
The WEA-RLC said the number of Christians has increased from about 0.4 per cent in 2007, when the country was officially declared as a secular state after over two centuries of Hindu monarchy, to 1.4 per cent of the 26.4 million people as stated in the Census 2011 report by the Central Bureau of Statistics.
However, the latest figures are a result of apparent manipulation, said Dr KB Rokaya, general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Nepal, with whom the WEA-RLC spoke in Kathmandu.
The WEA-RLC reported that Dr Rokaya, who is also a member of the government’s National Human Rights Commission, said he suspects “double manipulation.”
He said census takers are known for not visiting every house, and when they do visit a residence, they assume anyone with a Hindu name is a Hindu.
“When enumerators came to my house, they asked questions about family members but not about our religion. My wife noticed they had already marked us as Hindus,” he said.
The WEA-RLC reported Dr Rokaya said, “When preliminary results of the census were declared (in late September 2011), we were told that the number of Christians was two million, despite the fact that a large number of Christians were presumably marked as Hindus.”
The commission said Dr Rokaya suggested that even two million was an underestimation of the actual number. But the final census report, which came about 14 months later without explaining the reason for the delay, put the number of Christians at just 375,699, he added.
As all previous censuses were conducted when Nepal was under a Hindu monarchy – when religious minorities did not have equal rights – most people preferred to be identified as Hindu, according to the commission. It said about 80.6 per cent of people said they were Hindu in the 2001 census. However, even in the 2011 census, the percentage of Hindus remains unchanged at about 81 per cent.
~ www.worldevangelicals.org/commissions/rlc/
– JEREMY REYNALDS, ASSIST News Service
