“They called me “chinki” on my first day in Delhi. Not once every single day. And when I reported it, I was told: don’t be so sensitive. You’re in India now.”
A Manipuri student, New Delhi, 2023
This is not something new. It is not a narrative that has started off with a viral video, a protest, or a debate in parliament. It is a sore that has been torn open generation after generation on the bodies, identities, and dignity of millions of Indians of the Northeast.t. A world of eight states, more than 200 different ethnic groups, centuries of tradition and yet, narrowed down to slanted eyes and foreign face in the eyes of so-called mainstream India. The truth of the Northeast Indians under the BJP government since 2014, which boasts that it loves Ek Bharat, Shreshtha Bharat (One India, Great India), is a very different, very damning tale indeed.
The Slur That Became a Sentence
The word “chinki” is not just a slur it is a sentence. A judgment that is made by the majority that is the privilege of the majority, which says you are not one of us. In spite of the provisions of Section 3A of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities)Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, there are practically no convictions. In a single year 2022,
North East Support Centre & Helpline recorded more than 400 instances of racial abuse against Northeast Indians in Delhi alone and that too was only what was reported.. This 12-year-old BJP administration has never advocated a special anti-racial-discrimination bill, or even held any of its top ministers to account over the careless bigotry regularly aired in the political arena. When Bollywood actresses call a chinki, in blockbuster movies, and no one raises an eyelid, the culture of impunity is not by chance institutional.
Patna, Delhi, and the Geography of Hate
In a viral video from 2023, a group of men in Patna harassed a young woman from the Northeast, calling her a Nepali and telling her to go back to her country. In 2021, a Manipuri student in the Mukherjee Nagar, Delhi, was beaten outside his coaching centre. These are not one-time event they are part of a trend that has been going on for decades. Human Rights Watch report on India’s Northeast, of India notes that the Northeast Indians are being harassed out of proportion in the metro cities of India, both by landlords who refuse them tenancy, employers who insist on the sounding of their names like Indians, and police who reject their grievances as minor. States in which most of these happen, such as the BJP run states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, have not demonstrated any systematic attempt to sensitise police forces or seek accountability. The silence of Prime Minister Modi on the issue of anti-Northeast racism despite delivering impassioned speeches about national unity is louder than any policy.
AFSPA: The Law That Occupies a People
When the wound is every day racism, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) is the salt put in it by the very government that purports to defend all Indian citizens. Operating in the Northeast over six decades, AFSPA has enabled military members to arrest without a warrant, shoot to kill on suspicion, and act almost completely above the law. Civil society, human rights organisations and the people of Nagaland, Manipur and Assam have consistently protested but the BJP government has regularly extended AFSPA. In December 2021, the Nagaland killings of 14 civilians by the Indian Army in an instance of a mistaken identity in Mon district caused a lot of outrage.e. And what followed? No conviction whatsoever. No dismissals whatsoever. Just procedural extensions of AFSPA and no political talk. This is not how to run a country. This is employment camouflaged in the garb of national security.
The Citizenship Amendment Act and Its Northeast Wound
The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of 2019 has, perhaps, proven to be more visceral in its demonstration of the BJP contempt with Northeast identity, than any other BJP policy. The Northeast was outraged by another issue as the rest of India was arguing about its anti-Muslim nature: the CAA endangered to legalise the presence of the Hindu migrants of Bangladesh the same group that has caused decades of ethnic anxiety, land displacement, and identity erosion in Assam, Tripura and Meghalaya.. A hard-fought accord of 1985, the Assam Accord, to detect and expel illegal immigrants, was casually being over-ruled. Also, Protesters were killed in police firing in Assam. Students were tear-gassed.Internet got shut down. Nonetheless, the BJP regime and its Hindu nationalist calculus did not relent, as it did not think about the existential anxieties of the native Northeast populations.The message to the region was clear: our electoral math comes first, and your identity, land, and demographic interests come second.
‘Mainland’ India’s Moral Failure
It is especially vicious to be othered by people who have never been to your body, never tried your food, never read your poetry, never learnt to pronounce your name, and yet think it is their right to inform you that you are foreign.’ There is a breathtaking ignorance of the Northeast among the Mainland Indians, especially the Hindi heartland. ActionAid India did a survey in 2019 that showed that more than 60% of people in Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata did not correctly name more than three of the eight northeastern states. This is not the innocent type of ignorance. It is the creation of a school curriculum that barely talks of the Northeast, a media ecosystem that only reports on it when it floods or when there is an insurgency, and a political class especially the BJP that positions the Northeast as a security challenge and not a cultural homeland.d. When other people perceive Northeast Indians as foreigners in India, it is because their government has shown them to be so.
Women Bear the Heaviest Burden
The racism against the Northeast Indians is never gender-neutral. The women of the area especially in Delhi, Bangalore, and Pune have a toxic two-fold discrimination: racial othering coupled with sexual objectification.n. The unchanging stereotype of the Northeast women being easy or loose is a nauseating colonial hangover that the mainland men have never been questioned to explain leads to habitual harassment, rape, and exploitation.The 2012 gang rape of a Manipuri student in Guwahati, the murder of Loitam Richard in Bangalore in 2012 (which it took years to realize was racially motivated), and dozens of undocumented attacks on Northeast women in their hostels and workplaces tell a story of structural vulnerability. The Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (Save the Daughter, Educate the Daughter) campaign which the BJP government has so vociferously been promoting has never at any point explicitly addressed the harassment of the Northeast women that is targeted at them because that would be giving credit to the racism that the government does not want to recognize.
A Government That Visits But Never Listens
Every election year, BJP leaders go to Imphal, Itanagar and Dispur carrying garlands and promises.They put on traditional clothes during photographs. They cite Ashthalakshmi the name given to the eight Northeast states by the government as eight goddesses of prosperity. Then they go back to Delhi, where Northeast Indians are still being referred to as foreigners on the metro, where AFSPA continues to deprive communities of legal rights, where the CAA continues to threaten the lives of the indigenous population in real time, and where there is no special minister who has actual power to address the issue of anti-Northeast racism. The BJP has been characterized by political tokenism the photo-op without the policy in regard to the Northeast.The territory offers voting places; it is compensated with compliant gestures and irreverence towards architecture.
What Must Change: A Call to Conscience
The Northeast is not an issue that can be dealt with. It is Indian, varied and worthy of the same dignity that the constitution guarantees to every citizen.. The last thing that is required is another government campaign with a catchy slogan. What is required is a specific anti-racial-discrimination statute with actual enforcement teeth; the unconditional repeal of AFSPA; true constitutional guarantees of ownership of indigenous land under threat of demographic change; the compulsory teaching of Northeast studies in the school curriculum; and, most importantly, a government ready to look its own racism in the eye and name it as such. As long as the Manipuri student can be labeled a foreigner in the streets of Delhi without any action being taken, as long as the army can kill 14 civilians in Nagaland and get away with it and as long as the Prime Minister can talk about “unity in diversity” without addressing this wound India is not one nation. It is a dominant country that has just not been able to accommodate the rest.