- Abhijit Nath, NET Correspondent, Tripura
Agartala, March 22, 2022 : The Internally Bru Displaced Peoples (IBDPs) from Mizoram, who will be rehabilitated permanently across several regions of Tripura, following an agreement in 2020 demanded recognition as Bru instead of Reang in the ROR, electoral rolls and other documents.
Mizoram Bru Displaced People’s Forum general secretary Bruno Msha recently addressed a letter to the Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb and Chief Secretary Kumar Alok to recognize them as not to mandate the title “Reang or Riang” in their names also in permanent resident certificates. Msha said they are from the Bru community of the Reang Scheduled Tribe (ST).
The letters have been sent through the Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SDM), Kanchanpur, North Tripura district.
“… the Bru IDPs have been informed to write the name of tribe/nomenclature ‘Reang/Riang’ in their names in the Register of Ordinary Residents (ROR) and Electoral Rolls at Khahamthaipara resettlement location in North District and other locations as well”, he added.
“In this context, I would like to state that writing of the tribe Reang/Riang’ in the name of a person is quite inconvenient for the Bru IDPs because 90% of Bru people of Mizoram have Mizo names. Meanwhile, some of them have changed their Mizo names into their original Bru names when they fled from Mizoram and reached Tripura in 1997/1998/2009. Accordingly, names in their old documents and newly developed documents have become mismatch and irrelevant for using any purposes.”
The letter mentioned “Under this circumstances, a good number of families have been excluded from the final list of population survey conducted by the Government of Mizoram in 2016/2019 and by the Government of Tripura in 2000/2005/2020 due to mismatch of their names in the documents. Therefore, the Bru IDPs have to run from pillar to post to get their names corrected in various documents through AFFIDAVIT in the court of Judicial Magistrate and other means spending a huge amount of money for getting approval during the population survey.”
“So, all such documents like Aadhaar, Birth Certificate, School Certificate, etc. will be useless and have to change or correct once again with heavy expenditure by means of AFFIDAVIT if the title of ‘Reang/Riang’ is mandatory to write in the name of Bru IDPs in the ongoing process of registering names of family members in ROR, Electoral Roll, etc.” the letter reads.
He appealed to give their kind direction to the concerned department not to be compelled to write the title of ‘Reang’ or ‘Riang’ in the name of the person in ROR, Electoral Roll, ST, PRTC, etc.
It is worthy to mention here that the Bru internally displaced people (IDPs), the resettlement process had begun in five districts of Tripura and so far, 1,454 families had relocated permanently out of 4,900 families comprising 32,000 people.
After the Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb led government formed in the state, a historic agreement was signed between the representatives of the central government, Tripura government, Mizoram government, and organization of BRU IDPs on January 16, 2020.
As per the agreement, the process of permanent resettlement of Reang refugees on Tripura soil started and the central government gave a special package of Rs 600 crore to the Tripura government.
