Five days after she was stripped and made to run along a road just a kilometre away from Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi’s office at Dispur in the heart of Guwahati, 16-year-old Chameli (the family doesn’t want her real name to be used) is trying to muster up courage to somehow fight the trauma of what happened on her first visit to the city. And, in the process, wittingly — and sometimes unwittingly, too — she is getting drawn into the political campaign that sparked off violence across the state.

“I am no longer bothered about what happened that day,” she told The Indian Express today. “Instead, that incident has made me bolder and I have resolved that I will not back down.” A student of Class X — her Board exams are next year — Chameli sits on the verandah of her bamboo house with a tin roof in a village 240 km away from Guwahati in Sonitpur district. One of three brothers helps her with the intravenous fluid supplement she has been on since Sunday.

Gogoi has announced a Rs 1 lakh “compensation” to Chameli. “I don’t want to talk about any monetary compensation. It is of no use,” she says. The immediate milestone to cross, however, is her Class X exams. “I need to be educated,” she says, “I need to at least graduate.”

Chameli had gone to Guwahati by bus with two of her brothers, a cousin sister and several other boys and girls from her village and those adjoining, all travelling through Friday night to be part of Saturday’s rally organized by the All Adivasi Students Association of Assam (AASAA). The rally was called to demand Scheduled Tribe status to the Adivasi and tea-labourer communities (of present-day Jharkhand, Orissa, and parts of Bihar, MP, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh).

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