Aizawl: At least 276 Brus, out of more than 11,700 Bru people of Mizoram living in Tripura transit camps for over two decades and allowed to resettle permanently in the neighbouring state, have been removed from the Mizoram electoral roll, an election official said on Thursday.
Major civil society organisations and political parties have been demanding the removal of Bru voters settled in Tripura from the Mizoram voter list.
Mizoram joint chief electoral officer David Lalsanglura Pachuau said that the Tripura state election department sent corresponding deletion requests to delete the names of Bru voters, who resettled and enrolled in the state’s voter list, from the Mizoram voter list.
Till Monday, the Mizoram election department had received corresponding deletion requests to disenfranchise 276 Bru voters from nine assembly constituencies in three districts, who failed to return to the state during repatriation and already resettled in Tripura, he said.
The Tripura state election department had recently enrolled 1,090 Bru voters in the state voter list, while another 1,786 Bru voters were applying for enrollment in Tripura electoral rolls, he added.
Pachuau also said the Bru voters, who have been re-settled in Tripura and already enrolled in the state voter list, would be deleted from Mizoram electoral roll in a phased manner whenever a corresponding deletion request is received from Tripura, and their enrolment appeared in ERO (Electoral Roll Officer) net.
According to him, as many as 11,759 Bru voters, including 5,751 female voters, who have been in transit camps and allowed to resettle in Tripura, were enrolled in the Mizoram voter list.
Of the three districts where the Brus voters hail from, Mamit district housed the highest at 8,885, followed by Kolasib district, which has 1,979 voters, while 895 belonged to Lunglei district, he said.
Thousands of Brus migrated to Tripura, fearing ethnic tension in 1997.
There have been at least nine attempts to repatriate them to Mizoram, with the last round of repatriation being organised between October and November 2019.
More than 11,000 Bru people had returned to Mizoram during such repatriation exercises.
As per the agreement signed among the Centre, governments of Mizoram and Tripura, and representatives of Bru organisations in January 2020, the resettlement of more than 35,000 displaced Bru tribals in Tripura is under process.
In the past, the Bru voters used to exercise their franchise through postal ballots at their relief camps in Tripura until the assembly polls in 2018 and Lok Sabha polls in 2019, when exclusive polling stations were set up for the Bru voters at Kanhmun at the Mizoram-Tripura border.
NGO Coordination Committee, a conglomerate of civil society organisations headed by the Central Young Mizo Association (CYMA), had strongly opposed special polling booths for Bru voters during the bypoll to the Tuirial assembly held in October last year.
None of the 663 Bru voters in the Tuirial assembly constituency came to Mizoram and cast their votes in the bypoll.