OUR CORRESPONDENT
KOKRAJHAR: All Assam Tribal Students Union (AATSU) on Friday strongly opposed the recent approval granted by the Assam Government to the recommendations of the Group of Ministers (GoM) for inclusion of the six communities of Tai Ahom, Chutia, Koch-Rajbongshi, Matak, Moran, and Tea Tribes into the ST list. The AATSU submitted a memorandum to the President of India through the District Commissioner, Kokrajhar, to examine the anti-tribal move of the Government of Assam.
In the memorandum, the President of AATSU, Hareswar Brahma, said that the proposed inclusion of six communities was widely perceived as an anti-tribal move, as it posed a direct threat to the constitutional protections, socio-economic safeguards, and political rights of the existing ST communities, and that it had the potential to severely undermine smaller tribal groups such as the Bodos, Rabhas, Garos, Misings, Karbis, Dimasas, Sonowals, Deoris, Tengal Kacharis, and others, who rely on these safeguards for survival, representation, and development. He said that the six communities proposed for inclusion were socially, economically, and educationally more advanced than the existing ST groups and that they are well-represented in government services, politics, administration, education, and business and together constitute a significant population segment. Their entry into the ST list would overwhelm and marginalize the genuinely vulnerable tribal communities, defeating the very purpose of protective discrimination, he said, adding that the Lokur Committee (1965) laid down strict criteria for identifying ST communities, including primitive traits, distinct culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact, and backwardness. He also said that the six communities did not fulfil these criteria and therefore do not qualify for inclusion in the ST list under existing constitutional and anthropological guidelines. Their social integration and relative advancement stand in contrast to the purpose for which ST status was originally framed.
Brahma said that many of the six communities were already categorized under SC/OBC/MOBC and thus enjoyed reservation benefits that reflected their socio-economic condition. Including them in the ST list would amount to double reservation, while drastically shrinking opportunities for the genuinely marginalized tribal groups of Assam. He also said that their inclusion could empower the Assam Legislative Assembly to subsequently increase the ST quota, raising serious concerns regarding fairness, legality, and the constitutional intention behind tribal protections and that the development risked distorting the original purpose of reservations and enabling demographic domination over smaller tribal communities.
Through the memorandum, the AATSU urged the President of India to examine the what it called anti-tribal move and intervene in the interest of protecting the rights of the existing ST of Assam, to advise the Government of India to withhold approval for the inclusion of six communities into the ST list, to initiate a thorough expert review based on the Lokur Committee criteria, constitutional provisions, and anthropological evidence, and to ensure that the constitutional safeguards meant for the uplift of genuinely marginalized ST communities remained intact.
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