It may not be easy for the Rajasthan government to include Gujjars in the Scheduled Tribe (ST) list, say constitutional experts. The state government had rejected a similar demand by the Gujjars about 25 years ago, after finding the community did not fulfil the conditions set by the Dhebar Commission in 1960 for being included in the ST list.
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Tribes are identified by geographic isolation, distinct cultural relation, shyness of contact from the main community, economic backwardness, distinct language or dialect and non-existence of a caste system. The British had used a similar methodology in the early 1930s.
In the ’60s, Gujjars in Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir were given ST status for being “nomadic cattle breeders and not agriculturalists”, informs Shankar of the Campaign for Survival and Dignity, an NGO working for tribal rights. Gujjars in Haryana, Delhi or Rajasthan did not get similar status for being “agriculturists”, says a former secretary of the Government of India, who was not willing to be quoted.
P.S. Krishnan, advisor on reservation in the HRD Ministry, says, “Scheduled Tribes are identified in terms of tribal and cultural features. Wrong inclusion of a community will harm genuine STs.”
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Included among other backward classes (OBCs), Gujjars feel their social and educational backwardness prevents them from benefiting from the 27 per cent reservation for OBCs. So a place in the ST list would help them greatly in Rajasthan, which has very few tribes, they say.
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Included among other backward classes (OBCs), Gujjars feel their social and educational backwardness prevents them from benefiting from the 27 per cent reservation for OBCs. So a place in the ST list would help them greatly in Rajasthan, which has very few tribes, they say.
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Krishnan, however, has a different solution. He says the state government could categorise OBC reservation like many southern states and divide the 27 per cent seats into backward and most backward categories. That would give Gujjars most backward class status and more benefit.
Since the Dhebar commission, not many tribes have been included in the ST list. The inclusions have mostly been of sub-tribes of a major tribe already on the list. A new tribe is added only by an act of Parliament since inclusion calls for a change in the schedule.
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Legal experts like senior advocate K.T.S. Tulsi also feel the government and not the court has to take the final decision.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
