New Delhi: Appeals to grant Scheduled Tribes (ST) status to Manipur’s Meitei community have been rejected twice in the last 40 years, according to documents accessed by the Hindu.
The proposal was examined and rejected, first, in 1982, by the Office of the Registrar General of India (RGI); and again, in 2001, by the Manipur government.
However, the Union and Manipur governments did not make this information public during the ongoing ethnic conflict in the state, nor presented these records in the Manipur high court case on the Meitei petition for inclusion, the Hindu reported.
According to the report, the tribal affairs ministry fished out the old documents just days after the Manipur high court order to consider ST status for Meiteis was made public. After the judgment, the state saw violence between the Meitie and the Kuki-Zo communities, which led to the death of nearly 180 people and engulfed Manipur in a five-month long conflict.
Previous requests
The records, accessed by The Hindu under the Right to Information Act, 2005, showed that the RGI’s office had looked into the Meiteis’ inclusion in the ST list on a request from the Ministry of Home Affairs in 1982.
The RGI’s office found that based on “available information”, the Meitei community “does not appear to possess tribal characteristics”, and said that it was not in favour of inclusion. It noted that historically, the term had been used to describe the “non-tribal population in the Manipur valley”.
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In 2001, the erstwhile social justice ministry had sought the Manipur government’s recommendation while revising the SC/ST lists of states and Union territories. In response, the Tribal Development Department of Manipur, on January 3, 2001, had told the Union that it agreed with the 1982 opinion of the RGI on the status of Meiteis.
Then chief minister of Manupur, W. Napamacha Singh, had said that the Meitei community was the “dominant group in Manipur” and need not be included in the ST list. It noted that Meitei people were Hindus and “assumed the status of Kshatriya Caste in the ladder of Hindu Castes”, adding that they had already been listed as Other Backward Classes (OBCs).
These documents were not submitted to the single judge bench of Acting Chief Justice M.V. Muralidharan who was hearing the Meiteis’ petition earlier this year.
The criteria for inclusion in the ST list
The criteria followed by the RGI to determine whether a community should be included in the ST list were set in 1965 and are followed even today.
A proposal to change this criteria, based on an internal committee’s report, was floated in the Ministry of Tribal Affairs in 2014, soon after the Narendra Modi-led government came to power. In 2022, officials said there were no plans to change the decades-old criteria, the Hindu reported.
However, one of the recommendations made by the internal committee was to not discount a community’s plea for inclusion in the ST list solely based on the fact that they were followers of Hinduism, the report said.