Aizawl: With the enrollment of re-settled Bru tribals in Tripura’s electoral roll in progress, the names of more than 1,300 Bru voters hailing from Mizoram’s nine assembly constituencies have been defrenchised from the state’s voter list, an election official said Friday.
Mizoram joint chief electoral officer David Liansanglura Pachuau said that the names of a total of 1,336 Bru voters from three districts have been removed from the state’s electoral roll following their resettlement in Tripura and enrollment in the neighbouring state’s electoral roll.
Quoting election officials of Tripura, he said that enrolment of Bru voters in the neighbouring state’s electoral roll is in progress and a total of 5,009 Bru tribals have been enrolled in the voter list of Tripura so far.
However, the Mizoram government has received corresponding requests from its Tripura counterpart to delete the names of only 1,259 Bru electorates from the state’s voter list till date, he said.
With 77 Bru voters, whose names have been deleted based on scanned forms received from Tripura, a total of 1,336 names of Bru voters, who have enrolled in the electoral roll of the neighbouring state, have been removed from Mizoram‘s voter list so far, the official said.
The Bru tribals, who hailed from nine assembly constituencies in three districts, have been lodged at Tripura transit camps for more than two decades and were allowed to resettle in Tripura after they failed to return to their home state during repatriations.
Of the 1,336 Bru electorates, 1,134 hailed from Tripura border Mamit district, 187 from Assam border Kolasib district and another 15 voters hailed from Bangladesh border Lunglei district, he said.
He said that those Bru voters, who enrolled in Tripura’s electoral roll, will be automatically deleted once their names appeared for deletion on Electoral Roll Officer Net (ERONET).
According to Mizoram election department, 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 northeastern state’s voter list.
Thousands of Bru tribals are still lodging at seven relief camps in North Tripura district since they fled Mizoram following ethnic tension triggered by the murder of Lalzawmliana, a Mizo forest guard, near Persang hamlet inside the Dampa tiger reserve in Mamit district by suspected Bru militants on October 21, 1997
The first repatriation attempt in November 2009 was not only scuttled by the murder of Zarzokima of Bungthuam village by the Bru militants, but also triggered another round of exodus.
The Centre and governments of Mizoram and Tripura had made at least 9 attempts to repatriate the Bru tribals from Tripura between 2009 and 2019.
However, only about 11,000 Bru people had returned to Mizoram during such repatriation exercises.
A sizeable number of Bru families had also returned to Mizoram on their own.
On January 16, 2020, the Centre, governments of Mizoram and Tripura and representatives of several Bru organisations had 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.