Months after the Hattee community of Himachal Pradesh’s Trans-Giri area was included in the Scheduled Tribes list of the State, there is confusion in the Tribal Development Department about who the “Hattees” actually are and whether people already classified as Scheduled Castes should be included as members of this community.
The Tribal Development Department has now written to the Tribal Affairs Ministry in Delhi, seeking clarification on this point. It noted that while the Bill introduced in Parliament excluded Scheduled Castes, the entry added to the ST list just says “Hattee of Trans-Giri area of Sirmour District”.
The Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government had last year pushed hard for the inclusion of the Hattees in the ST list, announcing the decision months before the State went to the polls. The Congress, however, came to power in the State. Of the five seats in Sirmour district, the BJP had lost three. The Presidential assent for the addition was granted in August.
‘Does not exclude’
In a letter sent to Delhi last month, the State government has said that the matter regarding who the Hattees are was referred to the State Advisory Department (Law Department). The department had suggested that the entry added to the ST list does not specifically exclude the communities already notified as SC and hence the amendment must be construed accordingly.
But it also noted that in the Bill to add the community, the statement of objects and reasons specifically said that the intent was to include Hattees, excluding communities that had already been designated as SC. A senior official in the Himachal Pradesh government told The Hindu that the confusion was over how to interpret the entry that has recently been added to the State’s ST list.
According to past observations of the Office of the Registrar-General of India, people who are referred to as Hattees in the region also include those from communities like Koli, Badhai, Lohar, Dhaki, Dom, Chamar, etc. which are already designated as SCs.
Last year, Tribal Affairs Minister Arjun Munda had estimated that about 1.6 lakh people in Sirmour would benefit from Hattees being added to the ST list. The district’s population is around 5 lakh, as per the 2011 Census, of which close to one-third are Scheduled Castes, with the district already having two Assembly seats reserved for SCs. The only other ST in the region are the Gujjars.
The Hattee community in Himachal Pradesh has always argued that they deserve to be in the ST list because they share ethnic ties with the people of the Jaunsar-Bawar region, who were declared as ST in Uttarakhand.
But while the Union government had pushed through approvals for the Hattees’ addition to the ST list in the last two years, the Office of the RGI, has on previous occasions rejected the proposal to add Hattees as an ST — most recently in 2017.
It had noted based on information available at the time that “Hattee” was a term used to refer to the inhabitants of Trans-Giri area and that this included people from “upper status social groups” like the Khash-Khanet (Rajput) and Bhat (Brahmin) castes and people from Scheduled Caste communities like the ones mentioned above.
Reversed opinion
However, the Office of the RGI reversed its opinion on Hattees after a fresh ethnographic report was submitted by the State government, paving the way for the inclusion.
The decision to add Hattees to the ST list of the State had caused massive uproar in the region. The SC community and the Gujjar community in the district were upset over the move. People from SC communities have insisted that atrocities against them continue - mostly perpetrated by people from Bhat and Khas-Khanet castes - and that adding them to the ST list would only embolden them.
Further, the Gujjars, as the only other ST in the area, had opposed the move noting that they were historically a nomadic and pastoralist community and that once Hattees are added to the ST list, their community members would be crowded out of the benefits meant for tribespeople because they were relatively more backward.
