Aizawl: Names of more than 2,000 Bru voters out of over 11,000 from Mizoram have been deleted from the state voter list following their enrollment in neighbouring Tripura’s electoral roll, an election official said on Monday.
Mizoram Joint Chief Electoral Officer David Liansanglura Pachuau said that the state election department has received corresponding deletion request of over 3000 names from its Tripura counterpart so far.
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Of this, the names of 2,091 Bru voters have been removed from the Mizoram voter list so far and deletion of the remaining voters is going on, he said.
He said that the Bru voters, who re-settled in Tripura after they failed to return to Mizoram during repatriations, hailed from nine assembly constituencies in three districts.
Among the disfranchised Bru voters, 1,643 hailed from the Tripura border Mamit district, 187 from Assam border Kolasib district and the remaining 262 were from Lunglei district in the southern part of the state, he said.
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He said that the deletion was done as per the corresponding deletion requests sent by the Tripura election department through Electoral Roll Officer Net (ERONet).
Pachuau said that they have requested their counterparts in Tripura to expedite enrollment of the Bru voters in the state voters list as Mizoram is due for assembly polls next year.
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 and 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 had signed an agreement, according to which over 35,000 displaced Bru tribals, who were reluctant to return to Mizoram during repatriation, were allowed to re-settle permanently in Tripura.