More than a week after an Adivasi rally turned violent and sparked off tension across the state, the All-Assam Students Union (AASU) and two Adivasi student bodies on Sunday announced a ‘sampriti yatra’ to restore peace and harmony in the state.“We, as student bodies, think it important to go together and assure the aggrieved Adivasi community as well as others that the atmosphere of distrust and anger should come to an end,” three top leaders — Samujjal Bhattacharyya of AASU, Prahlad Goala of the All Tea Tribes Students’ Association (ATTSA) and David Horo of All Adivasi Students’ Association of Assam (AASAA) — said.Meanwhile, AASU decried media repetition that the girl stripped in public in Guwahati on November 24 was an Adivasi girl, and said she was just another Assamese girl and “a dear sister of all of us”.“Why keep repeating that the modesty of an Adivasi girl was outraged. Let us realise that she is a girl from Assam, and is definitely an Assamese girl and nothing else. She is a courageous girl, is a performing artist and that she sings and dances both jhumur and bihu, and is one of our dear sisters,” AASU advisor Samujjal Bhattacharyya said.The three student bodies would also rope in cultural personalities from all over the state to take part in the day-long ‘sampriti yatra’ which would go to the Adivasi-inhabited and other areas where tension had built up last week, particularly over an over-publicised picture of an Adivasi girl being stripped naked in the heart of Guwahati during an AASAA rally.The student bodies also announced they would stage a sit-in demonstration in all district headquarters of the state on December 7 to press for a speedy CBI probe into the November 24 incident. The AASAA and ATTSAA have already given a joint call for a day-long highway blockade in the state on Monday. The three student bodies, however, said annual examinations of schools under the state board had been exempted from the agitational programmes announced by them.
