Mizoram Chief Electoral Officer Ashish Kundra Tuesday appealed to a conglomerate of civil societies and student bodies to reconsider its decision to boycott the April 11 Lok Sabha elections in the state and observe indefinite bandh from April 8.
The NGO Coordination Committee (NGOCC) Monday said it would boycott polls to the lone Mizoram Parliamentary seat if special polling booths are established in the state for Bru refugees staying in neighbouring Tripura.
The Election Commission is setting up 15 exclusive polling booths in the Mizoram-Tripura border Kanhmun village for 12,081 Bru refugees, who are voters of Mizoram and now housed in six camps in Tripura. The step had been taken in the November 2018 state assembly polls too.
Kundra urged the civil societies not to deprive the people of their democratic rights and to ensure that people of Mizoram has representation in Parliament.
"At a meeting held before the assembly election last year, it was decided that Bru voters living in the relief camps would exercise their franchise inside Mizoram, and it was arranged. Officials of the EC, the NGOCC and the state election department had attended the meeting," the CEO said.
He told reporters that as far as he knows, there is no agreement that the Bru refugees will cast their votes in those polling stations of Mizoram where they were enrolled as voters.
The NGOCC had earlier threatened to launch agitation if temporary polling stations were set up for the Brus.
The organisation was of the opinion that those living outside Mizoram should not be allowed to vote in the state.
Thousands of Bru community people had been lodged in the six relief camps in North Tripura district since late 1997 after they fled from Mizoram in the wake of a communal tension.
The Centre and the governments of Tripura and Mizoram had taken steps to repatriate the Bru refugees but those efforts did not yield much.
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