Life in India’s Christian-majority northeastern states is often full of individual idio-syncrasies — and the focus keeps shifting between the pro-tagonists, particularly when politics seeks shelter under the shadow of church communities. Former Nagaland chief minister Vamuzo (he uses only one name) has said the Church in his Christian-majority state “is often like the air we breathe. It is everywhere but mostly nowhere.”
Such statements come into focus for Mizoram, another Christian-majority state, where a prominent Congress party leader recently apologized for opening alcohol outlets when his party ran the government between 2008 and 2018.
“We opened shops and issued alcohol permits against the interests of churches and NGOs, which was the main reason for our defeat” in the state polls in 2018, Congress leader Lal Thanzara has said. It shows the political clout the Christian community wields in Mizoram, where they form 87% of the state’s 1.1 million people. The majority of them are Presbyterians and Baptists.