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.
Mizoram joint chief electoral officer David Liansanglura Pachuau said that 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 that 1,736 voters were deleted bases on the corresponding deletion requests received from Tripura, while the rest 93 were deleted based on scanned forms.
The Brus originally hailed from nine assembly constituencies in Tripura border Mamit district, Assam border Kolasib district and Bangladesh border Lunglei district.
Of the 1,829 Bru voters, 1,614 belonged to Mamit district, 187 from Kolasib and 28 from Lunglei.
According to 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 Mizoram voter list.
Sources from Tripura said that the process of resettlement of about 35,000 thousands of Bru voters is in progress.
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 failed to return to Mizoram during repatriation, would be re-settled in Tripura.