The Mizoram Bru Displaced People’s Forum (MBDPF) in North Tripura has written a letter to the Chief Minister and the Chief Secretary with a request to grant permission to write the actual nomenclature of ‘Bru’ instead of ‘Reang/Riang’ in the name of Bru IDPs in ROR, Electoral Roll and in other documents.
Bruno Msha, general secretary of the MBDPF in his letter to the Chief Minister mentioned, “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.”“….writing of the tribe ‘Reang/Riang’ in the name of person is quite inconvenient for the Bru IDPs because 9o% of Bru people of Mizoram are having Mizo name. Meanwhile, some of them have changed their Mizo names into their original Bru names when they fled from Mizoram and reach to 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 reads.
According to the MBDPF, a good number of families were 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.
“The Bru IDPs have to run from pillars to the post to get corrected their names 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,” the letter said.
The MBDPF raised concern that all documents like Aadhaar, Birth Certificate, School Certificate would become useless– heavy expenditure would be required to change or correct the documents by means of affidavit if the title of ‘Reang/Riang’ becomes mandatory to write in the name of Bru IDPs in the ongoing process of registering names of family members in ROR, Electoral Roll, etc.
“It is my fervent appeal to your honour to give your kind direction to the concern department not to be a compulsory to write the title of ‘Reang/Riang’ in the name person in ROR, Electoral Roll, ST, PRTC, etc,” the MBDPF general secretary in his letter wrote.
The MBDPF also requested that the Government authority should approve the new name of resettlement location of `Khahamthai Rata’ officially instead of keeping three old names of local ADC Villages to identify this only one new resettlement location of ‘Wainbukcherra/ Ranipara/ Jalidhan’ for registration of names in ROR and enrolment in Electoral Roll to avoid re-correction of their names in the documents in the future.
(Representative pic from open source , internet)