ASMU to move court against RGI on ethnicity

By our Staff Reporter

GUWAHATI, Oct 9: The All Moran Students’ Union (AMSU) has said that it is going to move the court on, what it said, the community’s distorted ethnicity.

Talking to media at Dispur Press Club on Monday, AMSU president Arunjyoti Moran said: “The governments at the Centre and in the State have been depriving us on the issue of ST status. Apart from the six ethnic communities in the State, many other communities have been demanding ST status. The BJP came to power with the promise of according the six ethnic groups ST status. However, after coming to power the government of the party has failed to meet the promise.”

Moran said: “Our demand for ST status has been a long-pending one. Right from the beginning, the government has been neglecting our demand, instead of meeting it. In 1981 the Register General of India (RGI) rejected our plea for granting us ST status with the strange pretext that there has been no ethnic community with the me ‘Moran’. The demand was rejected in 2005 on the same ground.  The RGI has been rejecting our plea based on what one Geetanjali Baruah of the Department of Cultural Affairs wrote on Morans in the Assam series of the book ‘People of India’ published by the Anthropological Survey of India. The write-up is controversial. In 2008 the Government of India formed an expert committee for each of the six ethnic groups to write on them. In 2010, the six committees submitted their reports to the Tribal Research Organization. However, the reports have not been implemented as yet by the governments at the Centre and in the State. At our executive committee meeting held on September 8 this year, we’ve decided to move the court against the RGI, Tribal Commission (TC) and the Anthropological Survey of India (ASI) for distorting our ethnicity. We do have a separate history and identity. Our population in the Northeast is around four lakh, 3.5 lakh in Assam alone. Tezpur, Dibrugarh, Sivasagar, Jorhat, Golaghat, Lakhimpur and Dhemaji are some of the districts we’ve thick population. We’re ready to move the UNO on our various issues. Since pre-independence era businessmen from outside Assam have been grabbing the lands of Morans in Assam in the me of setting up industries, urbanization etc. The government has full support in this land grabbing. In order to raise all such issues at the intertiol fora our representatives are set to go to the UNO.”

Moran further said: “The AMSU is going to hold economic blockade in all Moran-domited areas in the State on October 23 and 24, 2017 in support of its demand for ST status, autonomy under Sixth Schedule of the Constitution of India, rescue and preservation of antics of the Morans and their royal landed property, etc. We’re going to hold a cultural congregation and a semir on Morans in November this year in Guwahati. In January next, we’re going to hold an intertiol semir on ‘Tribal problems in the Northeast from Globalization’.”