To Be or Not to Be a Tribe

The new Scheduled Tribe classification in Assam is political eyewash/Communities

- MANORANJAN PEGU

On 29 November 2025, thousands of protestors, mostly students from Bodoland University and Kokrajhar University, marched to the Bodoland Territorial Council Secretariat, protesting the state government's decision to grant Scheduled Tribe status to six communities. The demonstrators walked for around six kilometres, carrying banners calling for tribal unity, and shouted slogans calling the Assam government anti-tribal. They pushed past the gate, where they vandalised the furniture, as the state police force stood watching.

Three days earlier, the state cabinet had approved a report presented by a group of ministers, headed by Ranoj Pegu, the minister for the welfare of plain tribes and backward classes of Assam.

It recommended the inclusion of the Ahoms, Sutias, Moran, Matak, Koch-Rajbongshi and Adivasis (the so-called tea tribes) in the ST category in Assam. This was a result of long-standing demands by these groups for ST status. In the last few months, they had carried out various rallies calling upon the Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state, which had been promising them ST status since 2014. But the communities currently classified as STs—the Bodos are among them—had continuously opposed this demand and carried out protests to warn against this move.