The Sikkim government has formed a Sikkim state high-level committee (SSHLC) to work on the modalities to include 12 communities in the Scheduled Tribe list months after Union tribal minister Jual Oram stated that the demand had not been considered by the Office of Registrar General of India (ORGI).

The new committee, which has the secretary of the social welfare department as the member-secretary, is headed by Prof B.V. Sharma, the director of the Anthropological Survey of India (ASI), and former senior officials ofthe ORGI.

According to the gazette notification issued by the Sikkim government, the 12-member committee includes Dr Satyabrata Chakrabarti, the former deputy director of the ASI, Rangan Dutta, the former senior officer at the ORGI, among others.

The terms of reference for the committee stated in the notification issued by Sikkim chief secretary V.B. Pathak are as follows:

• Prepare a comprehensive ethnographic and anthropological studies report of the communities
• Meticulously spell out the grounds and substantive socio-cultural, historic, geographical, ecological and legal-constitutional justification for inclusion in the ST list
• Examine and elucidate the benefits of ST inclusion in terms of socio-economic upliftment and also culturalconservation
• Take the recommendations of the Sikkim government to the government of India

The committee has been asked to submit the report within three months.

The demand for tribal status to Kirat/Khambu/Rai, Gurung, Mangar, Thami, Sanyasi, Jogi, Khas (Bahun- Chhetri), Bhujel, Yakka(Dewan), Sunuwar (Mukhia) and Newar communities in Sikkim is similar to what the Darjeeling hills also want.

Sikkim, however, also wants to include the Majhi community in the tribal list.

Sikkim’s effort is seen as an attempt to make one major push for getting ST status for the communities. Earlier, communication fromthe ORGI had been unfavourable on the demand raisedby both the Bengal and Sikkim governments.

In September, Union tribal minister Oram in a letter to Sikkim Rajya Sabha member Dorjee Tshering Lepcha stated that the Sikkim demandhad not been considered bythe ORGI.

The content of the letter to Sikkim MP Lepcha concurred with the communication that residents and leaders of Darjeeling have been receiving for the last couple of years.

The letter to the Sikkim MP stated that according to the prescribed modalities, proposals recommended and justified by the state government/UT can be processed and the same has to be concurred with the ORGI and the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (NCST) before any change in the existing law is made to grant the ST status.

The BJP had promised to grant tribal status to these communities in 2014 and 2019 in the party’s Lok Sabha election manifestos.

The ruling Sikkim Krantikari Morcha (SKM) is an ally of the NDA in which the BJP is the main party.

In the past, three committees were formed to look into the Bengal government’s proposal on tribal status in 2016.

The final report compiled in 2019 by a team headed by M.R. Tshering, joint secretary of the ministry of tribal affairs, passed the buck tothe ORGI.

The ORGI, in its observations earlier, had said, among other things, that the “inflow of Nepalese immigrants will further increase” and “almost all” permanent residents of Sikkim would become ST if these communities get the status, leaving the morebackward communities like Lepcha and Bhutia (who are currently ST) disadvantaged and deprived.

The fact that many communities follow Hinduism but seek an ST tag was also seen as a stumbling block.

However, community leaders from both Sikkim andDarjeeling (Bengal) are confident that this demand willbe met.

A joint committee comprising representatives of Sikkim and Darjeeling was formed under the aegis of Sikkim chief minister Prem Singh Tamang (Golay) and Darjeeling’s BJP MP, Raju Bista, on October 6 to pressthe demand.