OUR CORRESPONDENT
KOKRAJHAR: The United Tribal Organization of Assam (UTOA) has firmly opposed the government’s ongoing process to grant Scheduled Tribe (ST) status to six ‘developed and populous’ communities of Assam.
The President of the UTOA, Markus Basumatary, said that the move to include six heterogeneous communities would pose a direct threat to the constitutional rights, land security, and cultural survival of the state’s 35 tribal (plains and hill) indigenous communities, who he said were the legitimate ST stakeholders of Assam. The UTOA expressed deep concern that the government had continued this process without any consultation with the tribal organizations. He said that the UTOA was a common platform representing the 35 tribal communities of Assam and also a member organization of the International Land Coalition (lLC), and the only indigenous organization from India that attended and represented the country at the Global Land Forum for indigenous people in Bogotá, Colombia, 2025. He also said that such an inclusion would reflect a deliberate attempt to silence the voices of the real indigenous people whose rights he said stood to be permanently harmed.
The UTOA reiterated that granting ST status to six communities would severely reduce access to land, employment, education, and political representation for the genuine ST communities of Assam. This decision would violate constitutional safeguards, threaten tribal belts and blocks, and accelerate demographic and cultural erosion across the Bodoland and the entire state, he added, saying that if the government continued the process without including UTOA in formal discussions or failed to address the legitimate concerns of the 35 indigenous communities, they would initiate a legal battle in the High Court and Supreme Court of India, and that they would also raise the issue at the international platforms, including the International Land Coalition, UN mechanisms, and global indigenous rights forums, to expose the BJP Government’s initiative that endangered the identity and existence of Assam’s true indigenous people.
The UTOA urged the government to immediately halt the process, uphold constitutional protections, and initiate meaningful dialogue with legitimate indigenous representative bodies before taking any further steps.
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