Guwahati: The Bru migrants from Mizoram have asked the Tripura government to recognize them as Bru instead of Reang in the electoral rolls and other documents.
The Bru migrants were permanently resettled in Tripura following an agreement in 2020.
In a letter to chief minister Biplab Kumar Deb, Mizoram Bru Displaced Peoples Forum secretary Bruno Msha requested him not to mandate the title “Reang or Riang” in their names also in permanent resident certificates.
Bruno Msha said that “writing of the tribe ‘Reang/Riang’ is quite inconvenient” for the Bru community because “90 per cent of Bru people have Mizo name”.
Msha said they are from the Bru community of the Reang Scheduled Tribe (ST).
He added they do not want to be referred to as Reang except in ST certificates.
Msha said some migrants changed their Mizo names to their original Bru names when they came to Tripura in different phases during ethnic tensions in Mizoram in 1997, 1998, and 2009.
Accordingly, the names of the Bru migrants in documents have become mismatched. Many of them even have to go to courts to get their names corrected.
“ … Under these circumstances, a good number of families have been excluded from the final list of a population survey conducted by the Government of Mizoram in 2016 and 2019 and by the Government of Tripura in 2000, 2005, and in 2020 due to mismatch of their names in the documents,” Msha wrote.
Twenty-three years after ethnic clashes in Mizoram, which forced 37,000 people of the Bru community to flee their homes to neighbouring Tripura, an agreement was signed in January 2020.
As part of the agreement, over 32,000 Bru migrants were allowed to permanently settle in Tripura.