Refugees and voters

Even as people in Mizoram are busy with the election campaign, Bru or Reang refugees will cast their votes on Wednesday and Thursday; the Election Commission has arranged for special postal ballots for them.

“This is a special case, and the EC has issued permission to arrange for letting them cast postal ballots. A 70-member team of officials and staff have left Aizawl today for the refugee camps in Tripura,” Lalhmingthanga, joint chief electoral officer, Mizoram, told The Indian Express here on Tuesday. Seven observers appointed by the EC have left separately for the refugee camps.

Lalhmingthanga said two booths would be set up for the 7,906 voters who are lodged in six refugee camps in north Tripura, where the people would cast their votes on November 26 and 27 respectively. Similar arrangements have been made for two groups of Bru refugees in Mamit district inside Mizoram on Wednesday and Thursday, he said.

Welcoming the EC’s move to arrange for voting by Bru refugees, Elvis Chorkhy, president of the Mizoram Bru Displaced People’s Forum, said the refugees would exercise their franchise primarily for asserting their rights as citizens of Mizoram. “This will give us an opportunity to exercise our political right,” Chorkhy told this correspondent from a refugee camp at Naisingpara in North Tripura.

“It has been 11 long years that our people have been languishing in sub-human conditions in relief camps in another state. Children are suffering from malnutrition, while most people do not have any source of income. We want to go back home as early as possible,” says Chorkhy. The Central Government has been providing them with foodgrain for over 10 years now.

Interestingly, political parties have been reaching out to these 35,000 refugees from Mizoram during elections. “I was there in the refugee camps in Tripura on Saturday and Sunday to seek votes of the Bru people for the Congress party,” says BK Handique, Union minister of state for chemicals and fertilisers here on Tuesday.

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