Mizoram: Ethnic pangs animate State with blandest polls 

Now Mizoram faces a refugee crisis after the coup in Myanmar; more than 12,500 Kuki-Zo people displaced from Manipur have taken refuge in the State

Nowhere in India are elections as bland as in Mizoram, where the influential church – mostly Presbyterian – and community-based NGOs issue stricter dos and don’ts than the Election Commission of India. The lack of colour and hyperbole, however, is compensated to some extent by strong ethnic passions in a State wary of the vai, a term that refers to any non-Mizo residing in Mizoram.

Mizos, meaning people of Zo origin, are the dominant community in Mizoram, almost all of whom follow Christianity.

For five elections since 1998, an issue that has partially impacted polls in Mizoram was the call by certain sections to disenfranchise the minority Bru people who fled to Tripura following ethnic violence in 1997. The issue was buried in January 2020, when the Union government facilitated the permanent settlement of about 34,000 Brus displaced from Mizoram in adjoining Tripura.

What Tripura faced for more than two decades, Mizoram began experiencing after the military coup in neighbouring Myanmar in February 2021. Thousands of Chin people, fleeing the civil war in Myanmar, began pouring into the State. In November 2022, a few hundred Kuki-Chin also took refuge in Mizoram after fleeing alleged persecution in Bangladesh.

The Chins, Kuki-Chins, and the Kuki-Zo people of Manipur are ethnically related to the Mizos.

Despite the Union government’s indifference to the refugee crisis in Mizoram, the ruling Mizo National Front (MNF) has played the humanitarian card to make the Myanmar and Bangladesh nationals feel at home. This did not seem to have worked for them, as the MNF, battling anti-incumbency, charges of nepotism, corruption, and fiscal crisis, suffered an electoral setback in central Mizoram in April. The extremist outfit-turned-political party, which won 27 of the State’s 40 Assembly seats in 2018, lost all 11 seats in the Lunglei Municipal Council to the Zoram People’s Movement (ZPM).

The ZPM — which displaced the Congress as the State’s main Opposition party in 2018 by winning eight seats, with its candidates contesting as independents — had given the MNF a run for its money in 2021 by penetrating areas in Chief Minister Zoramthanga’s Assembly constituency of Aizawl East-1, although it had bagged only six of the 19 Aizawl Municipal Corporation seats. Mr. Zoramthanga, a former extremist hardened by guerilla warfare, is a long-term president of the MNF.