Reservation War Formula for Victory Without Victim

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Reservation War Formula For Victory Without Victim


By: R.S. Mooshahary

The demand for ST status by the Adivasis, Tai Ahoms, Chutias, Muttocks, Morans, and Koch-Rasbongshis has opened up a can of
worms. One can fathom the complexity of the issue from the fact that despite the support of successive state governments and
civil society activists it is far from happening. In fact, there is a race to take the credit when it happens and for
apportioning the blame if it does not.

The demand has been examined and rejected by the central government more than once. May be the state government will send the
proposal again but it will be merely an exercise in passing on the buck to the center, which will further fuel the fire. It has
also created a dangerous polarization on ethnic line, which may set the state ablaze on an unprecedented scale. We need to
handle this vexed problem with more patience and foresight.

Scheduling a community as tribe is not as simple as categorizing communities as backward. The criteria for tribal identity are
specified in clear terms – the community must have primitive lifestyle, contact shyness, geographical isolation, cultural
exclusivity and area backwardness. Tribal is a geography, culture and livelihood specific trait and to be scheduled so is not
an automatic right. This is the reason why a tribe in one region of Assam is not a tribe in another region within the state or
in another state within the northeast.

ST status has important political content by way of reservation in the parliament, assembly and local bodies that empower the
tribes to grow according to their own genius. This aspect is crucial because every culture and ethnicity wants to blossom in
its own garden without being outgrown by another. This is an uninfringeable essence of tribalhood, which no new arrangement
must violate.

No one disputes the backwardness and poverty of the Adivasis in Assam. Indeed the state itself is an example of these deprivations and
if they were the sole factors for conferring ST status, the whole state population would become eligible to be tribal. Among the six
communities agitating for ST status, the Adivasis may fill the bottom slot in the human development index with the Tai Ahoms topping
the pyramid. Putting the communities in one basket may not be equitable because the more advanced groups will disproportionately
benefit from it. This happened in the brief period in 1996 when the Koch-Rasbongshis were granted tribe status through an ordinance. It
enabled them for a massive quota capture by virtue of their higher human development.

Ethnologically the Adivasis have the least claim to tribal status in Assam. They arrived here much later and that too as indentured
laborers and not as group wanderers for food gathering and in search of new homeland, which are tribal characteristics. Their
scheduling will also invite trans-provincial implications while that of the five others are of intra-state confines they being
indigenous to the state. Therefore, the perception at the national level may vary in scheduling all the six. Ideally, the Adivasis’
case should be handled as a separate package.

There will be very little for the Adivasis, given their present economic and educational conditions, in the ST grouping. They will be
placed among the unequals in the same battleground where the weaker will lose out to the stronger without hope. At the national level,
reservation has not really benefited them much as they have to compete with the advanced tribes like the Meenas, who corner the lion’s
share of the reserved jobs every year. The Koch-Rasbongshis and the Tai-Ahoms, in their tribal status, will be like the Meenas in Assam
legitimately appropriating the reservation pie. It is a fallacious notion that becoming a tribe ensures equity for all.

The Adivasis are the aboriginals of India but they are not the autochthones of Assam. The tribes of Assam are also Adivasis because they
were the earliest settlers here. In a way, they have commonalities of exclusivity. They both are victims of exploitation and social
inequity; but dissimilarities are larger. The Adivasis are a legion having vast territorial hold in central India, with considerable
influence in Indian polity; they are migratory and their flow along the continuum has given them greater numerical strength than the
tribes put together in the state. Assam tribes have no such trait or clout.

Tribes in Assam do not pose threat to each other because they are small and almost equally poised in their respective domains. There is
a lurking fear that conferring ST status to the Adivasis may invite large-scale migration from central India thereby threatening the
delicate tribe equilibrium in the state. They are also apprehensive, buttressed by empirical data that forward groups like the
Tai-Ahoms and Koch-Rasbongshis may overwhelm them by their intellectual superiority after their inclusion in the ST list.

The parameters of eligibility for recognition as ST are sacrosanct but the government may shortcut them if dictated by political
expediency and compulsions. And if that happens without protecting the interests of existing tribes who have woven their nests of hopes
and aspirations under the protective umbrella of reservation, they will go wild like the threatened wasps furiously stinging the state
into a painful ethnic unrest.

We should not embark on a policy that will hurt one group while trying to heal the pain of another. In dousing one fire, the sparks
should not cause conflagration not only in Assam but also in far away states like Rajasthan. Nor should it develop in to a situation in
which the deprived and the excluded groups fight another war of attrition against each other like the one that happened in mid nineties
between the Santhals and Bodos, which left more death and devastation than the insurgency in the last twenty years.

Reservation is already pegged at 49.5% and it cannot go up further. Within that limitation, the equitable and practical solution lies in
creating group specific reservation out of the OBC quota. It will then ensure that the share of a community is not appropriated by
another. More importantly, it will discourage migration and high growth rate, avoid group conflict and inspire greater sense of belonging.

This arrangement already exists as Assam has two types of tribal identities – the hill and the plain tribes with separate and exclusive
quotas and it is working smoothly. A new ST group – The Assam Special Tribes – can likewise be scheduled with separate and exclusive
quotas for each of the six communities out of the OBC quota. They can be identified as AST (Moran), AST (Chutia), AST (Muttock) etc. The
package should include area specific political rights by constituting autonomous councils based on ground factors of which Assam has
already half a dozen. That, of course, may be redundant for the Tai-Ahoms and Koch-Rasbongshis as they are the leading communities in
ruling Assam since the last seven hundred years. This model may work well for other states as well.

Any solution to this problem will require constitutional amendment and new legislation. So let it not be an amendment to foment ethnic
conflict and hatred but to bring durable peace. There may be other options but in this one, every group will win and none will lose.

(The writer is Chief Information Commissioner, Asom)