Agartala/Aizawl, Nov 19 (IANS) Reang tribal refugees, sheltered in seven camps in Tripura for the past 16 years, Tuesday began casting their votes through postal ballots for the assembly polls in Mizoram, officials said.
The elections to the 40-seat Mizoram assembly are scheduled to be held Nov 25.
“Six facilitation centers were set up in the refugee camps in north Tripura so that the eligible refugee voters could cast their votes by postal ballots for the Mizoram assembly polls,” North Tripura’s Kanchanpur sub-divisional Deputy Collector Anupam Chakraborty told IANS over phone.
“The balloting would continue till Wednesday…,” Chakraborty said.
He said: “The facilitation centres have been set up under the guidance of the Election Commission of India (ECI). The commission has been supervising the electoral works of these centres. Tripura government has provided the logistical support like security to these facilitation centres.”
The ECI appointed Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer Anil Kumar Jha as the special observer of the voting of the refugees.
Of the 37,625 Reang tribal refugees, locally known as ‘Bru’, living in the refugee camps in Kanchanpur and Panisagar in North Tripura since 1997, only 11,311 were listed in Mizoram’s electoral rolls.
ECI Director General Ashish Srivastava, accompanied by Mizoram’s Chief Electoral Officer Ashwini Kumar and other state officials, recently visited the refugee camps in Northern Tripura to finalise the voting of the refugees.
Refugee leaders complained to Srivastava that there were many eligible voters in the camps who were not included in the voters’ lists of Mizoram.
A Mizoram election department official told IANS: “Following the directives of the ECI, the officials of three Mizoram districts — Mamit, Lunglei and Kolasib — undertook a special drive in the refugee camps in Tripura to include names of eligible voters in the electoral rolls of the state.”
After a two-year break, the repatriation of the tribal refugees resumed Sep 30, with around 600 people comprising 90 families have gone back to their homes in western Mizoram.
The tribals fled their villages in Mizoram in October 1997 after ethnic clashes with the majority Mizos over the killing of a Mizo forest official. Many have since refused to return home from camps in Tripura unless their security is guaranteed.