Bangalore, Sept. 7: BJP top guns will discuss the impact of the dip in the growth rate among Hindus and other statistics released by the Census Commission about the country’s religious composition when they meet here tomorrow.

The party will come out with a response at the end of the meeting, to be attended by its chief M. Venkaiah Naidu, former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha .K. Advani and other senior functionaries.

Naidu said the BJP was worried by the “imbalance” in the composition of the population.

“The imbalance is a cause of concern for us. It is disturbing as the Hindu population is declining and the Muslim population is on the rise,” he told a news conference. “Yeh desh ke liye achchha nahin hain. Sab gambhirtha se sochna chahiye (This is not good for the country and has to be given serious thought).”

The BJP chief said the issue merits the attention of all political parties because Partition in 1947 was on the basis of religion. Parties ought to work in tandem on the issue without linking it to vote-bank politics, he added.

Naidu said his party would advocate population control for people of all communities. “Any imbalance in this regard is not a healthy trend,” he asserted. “Combined with the alarming phenomenon of demographic invasion by Bangladeshi infiltrators in India, this imbalance poses even more serious questions of a long-term nature.”

Besides discussing the population issue, the meeting would decide on the schedule of the tiranga (Tricolour) yatra planned by Uma Bharti as well as her political future. The former Madhya Pradesh chief minister, who had been detained on riot charges in Karnataka, was released yesterday.

Naidu said the BJP had no plans to instal her as its new chief. Rather, she would take up a “greater cause” and the party would decide how to utilise her services.

The BJP leader said Uma would attend tomorrow’s meeting as well as the “Vijayothsav” (a public rally organised by the party following her acquittal) in the evening. Vajpayee and Advani would address the rally here.

Cong slams BJP

The Congress has slammed the BJP for its reaction to the census. The BJP is seeking to make “political gains” out of the data which showed a “higher rate of population growth among Muslims”, party spokesman Abhishek Singhvi said, reacting to Naidu’s comments earlier in the day.

He wondered why the BJP was silent on a crucial aspect of the census, which showed that literacy rate and economic status of the country’s largest minority community were abysmal.

“It is well known that low levels of literacy and economic status have a negative co-relation with population growth rate. This is globally true,” Singhvi said. Instead of examining the causes, the BJP is making a communally divisive statement for narrow political gains, he asserted.