Kuki-Zo people, who fled Manipur in the light of the ethnic conflict underway since May 3 last year, have now approached the Supreme Court, seeking that the Election Commission (EC) be directed to make polling arrangements for the over 17,700 displaced Kuki-Zo people who are now residing in other parts of the country.
A Bench headed by Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud on April 8 agreed to list the writ petition at an early date after it was mentioned before the court.
The petitioners pressed for an urgent hearing, saying that the last date for submitting ID forms to the Assistant Returning Officers concerned for displaced voters was on April 9, Tuesday.
Manipur is going to polls in two phases (April 19 and April 26) in the shadow of the ethnic conflict between the valley-based Meitei people and the hill-based Scheduled Tribe Kuki-Zo people that began last year. The conflict has killed at least 220 people so far, injured thousands of others, and displaced tens of thousands of people, many of whom also fled the State.
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Special polling stations
The EC has said that arrangements have been made for 94 special polling stations for the around 25,000 internally displaced persons who are currently housed at about 300 relief camps within the State. However, several people — from both the Kuki-Zo and the Meitei communities — fled the State, for whom no specific arrangements have been announced.
The writ petition has been filed by two Kuki-Zo people who fled to Mizoram and Delhi respectively and by the Manipur Tribals Forum, Delhi. The petitioners have argued that the EC had “ignored the plight of thousands of IDPs scattered outside Manipur” who are “being disenfranchised”. They added that these displaced persons are deeply concerned about being denied their right to vote.
The petitioners have submitted that the largest number of such displaced persons are currently in Mizoram (9,192), followed by Delhi NCR (4,352) and Assam (1,237). In addition, many of these displaced Kuki-Zo persons are in Kohima, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Shillong, Hyderabad, and Mumbai among other cities.
The petition argued that while the EC was continuing to facilitate Kashmir voters who are settled in Delhi, it is allegedly ignoring the voting rights of the tribal Internally Displaced Persons who had been scattered across the country since the violence began in Manipur.
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An official of the Delhi Meitei Coordinating Committee, a conglomerate of Meitei civil society organisations in Delhi, told The Hindu that about 1,000 people from the Meitei community had also been forced to flee the State in the light of the conflict. They added that there are no exact number of such persons available with them but that they were spread across metros like Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai.
The petitioners said a letter written by 10 Kuki-Zo MLAs of Manipur to the EC about making arrangements for displaced people outside Manipur had also gone unanswered till now.
