A Short history on the schedule tribe status of Manipur

Longjam Tony Angom *

Lai Haraoba festival of manipur

The people of Manipur had a history of more than 2000 years old & a civilization of its own & the appearance of the new set up in which all the 552 princely states of that time would either join India or Pakistan was a bit hurry.

India was just a new political formation & there were a large number of conflicts among the princely states in terms of opinions, feelings & aspirations. People were thinking in terms of exercising their own political relationships between the ethnic communities, they were also thinking in terms of modernising themselves & organise a constitutional ruler ship.

And our king Maharaj Bodhchandra himself had agreed to share some of his powers to become a constitutional monarch. Therefore in the early pre colonial feudal state, there was an experiment as to whether the government could share power with the people or not.

In 1947 after the departure of British it was necessary for the Indian union to perform a survey to find out the castes & tribes among the princely states.

As a result, in 1949 a minority commission was formed headed by the Assamese premier Gopinath Bordoloi & Nicholas Roy from Shillong.

The minority commission unfortunately met some intellectuals of that time who were looking for a political space in the Manipur Legislative Assembly & it was these intellectuals who on their lust of becoming political leaders made a statement (by suppressing the real identity) that the people of Manipur (Meitei) were true Aryans race.

Therefore, the minority commission without consulting the anthropologists went into a conclusion that the dominant class Meitei should belong to the general class. Had there been some DNA test conducted, the identity problem of the Meitei would have been solved by then. India's first schedule tribe lists should have considered more on the socio-economic conditions of the tribes than on cultural aspects.

In the first British census report of 1931 the people of Manipur were declared the genuine half-clad hill tribes of the Western South East Asia. Subsequently in 1948 during a visit of the then governor of Assam Mohammad Akbar, an ICS officer recommended that before the constitution of India is written, the people of Manipur should send reports demanding either a schedule caste or schedule tribe status.

He was also amply clear in his statement that the people of Manipur can never belong to the general class because of their poor socio-economic condition.

But the painful side of the story was no such efforts were made by the politicians of that time. Further in 1981 when Indira Gandhi came into power, the then Chief Minister of Manipur Risang keising also made an attempt to discuss the schedule tribe status of Meitei during the assembly session.

However, no such motion was moved by the members of the Manipur Legislative Assembly. It was also pretty clear according to the Parliamentary Advisory Committee of the Backward Classes Commission of 1955 (also called as Kalekar Commission) that the primitive hill tribes of Western South East Asia should belong to the schedule tribe category.

Tapta's lyrics "chahi khunthra gi matung mitop singna pallani Meitei haiba phurup se minai oina leirani, matam tuda noidi miyang onga douribro" talks about the inevitable suppression of Meitei by the socially more advanced, economically more developed dominant communities & it's quite obvious that Meitei being a general class will certainly not be able to stop these dominant population from acquiring properties.

On the other hand, it is very fortunate that six different ethnic communities from Assam are also demanding a ST status & it's high time for the Meitei as well to get into the momentum, get it done during the monsoon session of the parliament.

"A Political leader who lives in a society should be in a position to read the signs of the times even in a festive gathering, but one who remains shut up in his bungalow learns nothing."

"Sanaleibak na Yaiphare"