New Delhi, April 23: Union ministers belonging to the BJP and as well as the Congress have pledged support to a Bill in Parliament for inclusion of Assam’s Koch-Rajbonshis in the Scheduled Tribe list. However, that is yet to become a reality.

“We will try and introduce the Bill, but a specific time-frame can’t be set right now. However, we can say that we will not resort to short measures like Ordinances, which the Congress government had resorted to earlier,” Union minister of state for water resources Bijoya Chakraborty said.

The Union minister visited Koch-Rajbonshi delegates who staged a dharna at Jantar Mantar here today.

The delegates were, however, peeved at the changing stance of Chakraborty. “Yesterday, she said she would work towards introducing the Bill in the next session. But today she said she didn’t want to specify any time-frame,” Narmada Talukdar pointed out. The Assam unit of the BJP had passed a resolution in 1998, supporting the inclusion of the community in the Scheduled Tribe (plains) list.

The agitation by the Koch-Rajbonshis in this regard has been on since the past decade.

The granting of Scheduled Tribe status was recommended by the Assam government in 1994. It was supported by the report submitted by the Assam Tribal Research Institute, the registrar-general of India, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and two Parliamentary committees.

“The granting of the ST status involves recommendations from five institutes, including the state government. We have already crossed these hurdles. It is because of some errors that our community did not figure in the list drawn up last year, which was incorporated in the Constitution Amendment Bill, 2002,” Durlav Chamua, general-secretary of the All-Assam Koch-Rajbonshi Sanmilani, said.