Bangladesh has agreed to take back over 350 of its tribals who have been sheltering in the Indian state of Tripura since Monday following ethnic strife in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), an official said Friday.
Officials of the Border Security Force (BSF) and Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) held meetings on the issue Wednesday and Friday, said Northern Tripura's Gandachara sub-divisional magistrate Bhaskar Dasgupta.
"The BGB officials have sought list of names, group photographs and details about the infiltrators to take follow-up actions," Dasgupta added.
"After the verification of the names and other details of the tribals, the BGB would take back the refugees," Dasgupta told reporters.
Earlier, the Tripura government communicated the matter to the union home and external affairs ministries.
An official of Tripura's home department told IANS that Tripura Chief Secretary Sanjay Kumar Panda and Dhalai District Magistrate Milind Ramteke had separately spoken to Indian High Commissioner in Bangladesh Pankaj Saran to take up the matter with the Bangladesh government.
The district administration has provided food and relief to the immigrant tribals, comprising men, women and children.
Over 350 tribals, including women and children of over 70 families of Chakma and Tripuri tribes, have taken refuge in four villages of Tripura's Gandachara area, around 200 km northeast of Agartala, along the Bangladesh border since Monday.
According to the Tripura government officials, the tribals, mostly Buddhists and Hindus, fled from their villages in Bangladesh after some "miscreants" allegedly attacked their homes in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), a tribal dominated area in southeast Bangladesh that borders India and Myanmar.
Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar said: "Our officials are in touch with the Bangladesh government officials over the issue."
BGB officials during the meetings, however, told their BSF counterparts that tribals were not attacked.
"Only a market was burnt recently and after that the fear-stricken tribals left their villages and took shelter in Tripura."
The Tripura home department official said: "The UPDF (United People's Democratic Front) activists supported by the local anti-peace accord groups are always hostile and have occasionally attacked the houses of Chakma and Tripuri tribals."
The UPDF has been opposing a peace accord signed in 1997 between the Bangladesh government headed by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samity (PCJSS) led by Santu Larma.
The PCJSS's armed wing, Shanti Bahini, is demanding sovereign status for tribals in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and had waged guerrilla warfare against the Bangladesh government for two decades until 1997.
In 1986, over 74,000 tribals took shelter in Tripura following violent attacks. The refugees returned to their homes after the peace accord was signed.
In a similar incident of attacks in August last year, over 1,500 tribals took shelter in the border village of Karbook after fleeing from five villages in the same Khagrachari district over the reported abduction of a leader of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party.
Tripura shares an 856-km border with Bangladesh that is porous because it extends over densely forested mountains. Over 25 to 30 percent of the India-Bangladesh border is still unfenced.
