A satirist based in upper Assam’s Jorhat has been booked for his alleged derogatory remarks against the Adivasi community.
A case (number 2758/19) has been registered against satirist Bikash Baruah at Jorhat police station in this regard.
The Sanmilita Nagarik Mancha, a Jorhat based citizens’ group, lodged a complaint with Jorhat Police Station against Bikash Baruah and Pradip Baruah, the editor of Assamese fortnightly, Prantik for writing about the tea garden community of Assam in derogatory and humiliating terms in a write-up.
Devabrata Sharma, principal of Jorhat College, one of the complaints said that Baruah, a general practitioner of medicine may have had his reasons but he cannot degrade the whole community in such a manner.
This had not only hurt and humiliated the Adivasi community as a whole but will have an adverse impact in uniting the different communities in Assam.
Moreover, the write-up mentions the tea community and Adivasis as 100 per cent Bengali and not even 1 per cent Assamese and this could have grave consequences for Assam and the Assamese if the community decides to act on this.
“If the almost 1 crore Adivasi population actually decide to identify themselves as Bengalis, then the Assamese will become a minority in their own land,” Sharma further said.
The FIR has elucidated some of these statements mentioned in the write-up by Baruah, including the one in which animals have been graded in three classes, the first being tiger, elephant, cows and a few more, the second mongoose, snakes, etc, and the third mosquitoes, leeches, worms, etc., and that the Adivasi community belonged to an even lower class than the third one.
Another one referred to them as man eaters.
Baruah writes a column titled Ranjan regularly in the Prantik magazine and the write-up has been written under the heading, Ajagar meaning python.
Two other complainants are advocate Hemen Baruah and Assam Film Society secretary Jayanta Madhab Dutta.