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Silchar, Oct. 1: The administration of both Cachar district in Assam and Kolosib district in Mizoram have scheduled a meeting of deputy commissioners here on Friday in a bid to find a common ground on the border tangle that erupts from time to time between the two states.
A senior official of the Cachar district administration today said while Harendra Kumar Deb Mahanta will lead the official delegation of Cachar, Kolosib deputy commissioner Niharika Rai will head the delegation of senior officials from her district in that meeting, which will be held in the conference room of the Cachar deputy commissioner here.
The border row flared up again last Friday, after a lull that on the Assam-Mizoram border for a considerable period, with the All Barak Youth and Students’ Association staging a blockade at Lailapur village, 45km from here on the border, immobilising traffic to and from Mizoram.
The blockade was lifted last evening after the Cachar district administration assured the association’s leaders that an official meeting of the Assam and Mizoram governments would be held here on Friday to find a solution to the inner line permit (ILP) imbroglio which is preventing Cachar labourers from working in Vairengte in Mizoram.
The grant of the ILP to non-Mizo workers for their travel to the adjoining state is governed by the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation Act of 1873 for ensuring permanent safeguards to the Mizos, who nurse the fear that unless some preventive official steps are taken, they might one day be outnumbered in their own state.
The association’s chief, Baharul Islam Barbhuyan today said his association would wait for the outcome of Friday’s official meeting here, and if it fails to clear the existing border deadlock, his forum would again consider resuming the blockade along the border.
The genesis of the Assam-Mizoram border row can be traced to the controversy relating to the demarcation of their borders on the basis of two different maps prepared during the British rule. While Assam has been insisting on the use of a map drawn in 1933, the Mizoram government has been stridently arguing for the acceptance of yet another earlier boundary notification in 1875 demarcating the boundary between Cachar district and former Lushai hills district, which later became Mizoram. From time to time, both governments have been accusing each other of trespassing. A deputy commissioner-level dialogue on the border row between the districts of Cachar and Aizawl was held in November 1988, but no breakthrough was achieved.
The latest border row erupted on September 11 when a team from an Opposition political party of Mizoram demolished a border pillar erected by the Cachar forest department on Lailapur border village.
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