Jammu, July 25: Members of the All J&K Gujjars – Bakarwal Coordination Committee today submitted a bill for consideration during the Monsoon Session of Parliament to give Scheduled Tribe (ST) Status to the “Pahari and other Communities.”
All members of the Gujjar-Bakarwal Coordination Committee stated during a news conference that the measure should be abandoned and that it should not be taken into consideration to include upper cast non-tribal communities as scheduled tribes.
Since these communities are a collection of diverse, established groups that share the Pahari language as their common language, they are not one single ethnic group. The majority of these Paharis are members of elite castes, entrepreneurs, landowners, and former Peer Panchal region rulers. How they became scheduled as a tribe. A nomadic ethnic group called the Gujjars and Bakarwal is dispersed over the whole J&K. They claimed that a significant portion of their population was remained homeless.
They claimed that when the Article 370 Forest Right Act was repealed and the Schedule Tribes in the UT of J&K were given political reservations, they were officially recognised as a Scheduled Tribe in 1991.
They have yet to enjoy the benefits of the Forest Rights Act or political reservations, and by filing this measure, they risk having their ST Status diminished. You can see from prior documents and history that the Gujjar and Bakarwal communities are patriotic, and reducing their Scheduled Tribe designation would be a grave insult to these good people.
Those who addressed the press conference include Adv Anwar Choudhary, Adv Ashok Basotra, Adv Parvez Ahmed, Adv Akram Choudhary, Choudhary Aslam Khan, Adv Mushtaq Ahmed Choudhary, Haji Hasham Ali, Haji Abdul Hamid Choudhary, Adv Shah Mohammad Chowdhary, Haji Ali Hussain Hakla, and Choudhary Bashir Ahmed Noon.
