Aizawl: With the resettlement of displaced Mizoram’s Bru people in progress in Tripura, more than 1,800 names of Bru voters have been deleted from Mizoram electoral roll, an election official said on Saturday.
David Liansanglura Pachuau, Mizoram joint chief electoral officer, said a total of 1,829 Bru voter names have been removed from the state’s voter list following their enrolment in Tripura electoral roll.
He said the names of 1,736 voters had been deleted based on the corresponding deletion requests received from Tripura, while the rest 93 had been deleted based on scanned forms.
The Brus originally hailed from nine assembly constituencies in Mamit district which shares a border with Tripura, Kolasib district which shares a border with Assam, and Lunglei district which shares a border with Bangladesh.
Of the 1,829 Bru voters, 1,614 belonged to the Mamit district, 187 from Kolasib, and 28 from Lunglei.
According to the Mizoram election department, as many as 11,759 Bru voters, including 5,751 female voters, who have been allowed to re-settled in Tripura were enrolled in the Mizoram voter list.
Sources from Tripura said that the process of resettlement of about 35,000 Bru voters is in progress.
Worth mentioning here that thousands of Bru voters had fled to Tripura following ethnic tension triggered by the murder of a Mizo forest officer by the erstwhile Bru militant in 1997. Since then they have been living in transit camps for more than two decades.
The first repatriation attempt in November 2009 was not only scuttled by the murder of a Mizo villager by the Bru militants but also triggered another round of exodus.
The Centre as well as the governments of Mizoram and Tripura had made at least 9 attempts to repatriate the Bru tribals from Tripura between 2009 and 2019.
On January 16, 2020, the Centre, governments of Mizoram and Tripura, and representatives of several Bru organisations signed an agreement according to which over 35,000 displaced Bru tribals, who failed to return to Mizoram during repatriation, would be re-settled in Tripura.
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