Samiti still hopeful of tribal status for Hattee community in Sirmaur's Trans-Giri area

Tribune News Service

Solan, April 5

The Kendriya Hattee Samiti is optimistic that the community in the Trans-Giri area of Sirmaur will get the tribal status. Though the Union Government has rejected the state’s government’s proposal of 2016, the samiti leaders say that a fresh exercise is underway in this regard.

A delegation led by Dr Ami Chand Kamal and Kundan Shastri, president and general secretary of the Kendriya Hattee Samiti, respectively, had met Registrar General of India (RGI) Vivek Joshi in January and apprised him about the work related to the fresh proposal of ethnography of the Hattee community undertaken in 2018 by the Tribal Research and Training Institute Himachal Pradesh.

Kamal says that the findings of the institute were submitted to the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs in October 2021. The report had recommended that the Hattee community qualified the parameters, as per the Lokur Committee’s criteria necessary for declaring a community in India as a Scheduled Tribe. “The office of the Registrar General of India, time and again, in its letters of 2006 and 2017, had contended that the proposal could not be considered favourably. This assertion was entirely based on the misinterpreted inclusion of Brahmins and Rajputs in the Hattee community. The Khash-Kanet and Bhat communities,however, have a different origin and identity, which they have retained over many generations,” he adds.

Kamal points out that some of the major Scheduled Tribes of Himachal Pradesh are stratified in their social structure and the names such as Gaddi, Gujjar and Kinnaura are also generic in nature. This information, he claims, can be verified from the document series published by the Anthropological Survey of India, titled ‘People of India: HP, Volume XXIV’ (1996).

He says that an ethnographic study of the Hattee community undertaken by the Department of Anthropology, Panjab University, in 2019 further supports their point of view. “After getting the concurrence of the Registrar General of India, the Union Tribal Affairs Ministry will notify and prepare a Cabinet note, which will be presented to both houses of Parliament. Thereafter, it will be sent for the President’s assent,” says Kamal. —

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