New Delhi: Home Minister Shivraj Patil has virtually ruled out giving Scheduled Tribe status to the protesting tribal people in Assam.
Quoting from observations of the Registrar General of India and the Backward Class Commission, Patil said, “The local committee and RGI have said back in 1965 that they can only be granted Backward status and not ST status as many of these tribes have lost their tribal characteristics in their present surroundings.”
Patil added that the tribal people did not even have ST status in their own state.
His statement came in the wake of a rally taken out in Guwahati on Monday, where occurred a shameful incident when an Adivasi woman was stripped naked by two local shop-keepers and brutally beaten up by other men.
Since the past few days, tribal people in Bentola and Guwahati have been agitating in order to obtain ST status for themselves. Most of them are tea-estate workers.
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