Racism And The City

Three boys from Assam become victims of hate crime in Delhi. The media looks away.

WrittenBy:Arunabh Saikia
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When as a 16-year-old I left home to study, the final parting advice I received was to not to go around telling people, “I’m from Assam”. I had then thought it was a strange – almost offensive – thing for my now dead aunt to say.

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Barely a few months later, while returning to my one-room paying guest accommodation in a town in Rajasthan, I was asked to stop by a police patrol vehicle.  It was around 8 pm and I was on my way back from a full day of lectures at the engineering school coaching centre I had enrolled myself in. The constable demanded to know why my shirt had a button too many undone. I didn’t have an explanation to offer since I got to know only when he pointed it out. I knew the exercise was completely random and the easiest way out was to mutter an apology.

The cops didn’t sound convinced, though, and insisted on knowing where I came from.

“Assam,” I said.

Over the next fifteen minutes or so I realised what my aunt had meant. The cops went from how I was there not to study but indulge in laundagardi to how people from the “east” had no values and just wanted to fool around.

While the encounter may seem clichéd in terms of how it ended, it was a lesson well learnt for me.  I have since consciously refrained from invoking my Assamese origins in situations of possible conflict. Sticking to “Delhi” when asked where I’m from on occasions of potential threat, has worked well for me and I manage to sound fairly convincing since I’ve spent almost 10 years in the Hindi belt.

At the risk of coming across as cowardly, I’d admit here that my bravado is almost invariably restricted to my computer’s keyboard. It’s a practical thing to do and I like to believe there is nothing wrong in choosing your fights.

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Last week when Apurva Bora, Mriganka Shekhar Nath and Abhisekh Shyam went to their neighbourhood market in South Delhi’s Malviya Nagar to get a laptop fixed, it is unlikely that they remembered any such advice – which they must have received at some point too.

What follows is an account of how a seemingly ordinary Monday turned into a nightmare for the three boys, according to a first information report (NO.1516/14) lodged in the Malviya Nagar police station. The details of the incident have been corroborated by the Investigating Officer at the police station.

It was around 3 pm, as they waited inside the computer-repairing shop in Khirki Extension. It was then that they heard a loud noise outside – a school van had banged into their parked motorbike outside the shop. Almost as a reflex action, they rushed outside and accosted the driver of the car.  The driver was accompanied by a caretaker, seated next to him and three other kids in the rear seat of the vehicle. Their motorbike had suffered substantial damage because of the crash and the driver agreed to pay for the repairs.

However, he said that he’d have to drop the kids home first as he was on a private school’s duty. The driver offered to leave behind the caretaker as guarantor. It was, till then, another one of those minor road accidents that occur everyday in the city.

When the driver returned though, after about an hour, and the group was approaching a nearby garage, he happened to ask the three young men that one dreaded question:  “Where are you from?”

As soon as they said Assam, the driver and his accomplice’s demeanour changed – “Oh Northeast!” They refused to pay and instead made a few phone calls. In less than half an hour, a group of about 15 men arrived who asked the driver and his accomplice to leave. “We’ll take care of them,” they said. As the duo prepared to leave, Apurva Nath followed them to note down the number of the vehicle, which was parked some distance away. The group caught up with him, pounced on him, and cracked open his skull. When the other two intervened, they were also beaten up.

All of this happened in the full view of a busy marketplace but no one bothered to interfere. Finally, after a good 15-20 minutes, the trio managed to flee and reach a private doctor’s clinic in the vicinity, where the doctor called on the cops.

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Ironically, I came to know about the incident, in spite of living and working hardly two kilometres from where it took place, only when concerned relatives and friends from back home started making calls  (customary every time a “racial attack” is reported) to enquire. The television media in Assam had supposedly gone to town with the story and folks back home were genuinely surprised about my ignorance. “You’re supposed to be a journalist,” they despaired. I scanned the newspapers front-to-sports page, but failed to find a single mention.  A beat reporter couldn’t have possibly missed this – surely, there was a mistake, I thought.

It was only by the weekend that I managed to retrieve the case details from the Malviya Nagar Police station, where the first information report was filed. It was through the Investigating Officer, Sub Inspector Brahma Pal (who corroborates the above account) that I managed to get the contact details of the boys.

When I called up Apurva Nath on Friday evening, I could hear a commotion behind him.  He was back in his hometown Nagaon by then. “Can we speak later, please? I’ve just reached home,” he said, and I could hear someone behind, presumably his mother or sister, breaking down. He had received multiple stitches on his head, had to be shifted to Safdarjung Hospital from the private clinic in Malviya Nagar.

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In a piercing blog post following the aftermath of the much-talked about murder of Nido Tania from Arunachal Pradesh in February, author Janice Pariat had narrated how she and a friend of hers were beaten up in a South Delhi locality. The episode had followed a somewhat similar trajectory as the Malviya Nagar affair – a slight street altercation that ended on an ugly note, because one of the parties happened to belong to a certain part of the country. Even Nido Tania’s macabre murder was the result of a roadside row, which escalated into a violent homicide with strong racial connotations. A few months later in July a 29-year-old Manipuri man was beaten to death by a group of five men in a case of road rage in South Delhi’s Kotla Mubarakpur area.

Two common cords tie up all these incidents – the victims were from the Northeast and were casualties of Delhi’s extremely short fuse that becomes even shorter on its roads. Delhi’s roads seem to almost amplify the inherent idea of racism that a certain section in the capital has internalised by the dint of some strange idea of ownership of the city. It is a bizarre claim of ownership since Delhi, unlike say a Chandigarh or Patna, is hardly native to anyone in the strictest sense of the term.

While it is easy to dismiss claims of “Delhi is ours and not yours” as being specific to a certain economic and social background, it is naïve to do so.  At a book launch ceremony in one of South Delhi’s plushest venues last winter, I was surprised to hear a member of the audience blaming (on the microphone) the city’s woes on migrants from Bihar and the Northeast. “Shouldn’t there be some sort of a visa system for people from the Northeast,” he had suggested to the collective shock of the audience.

There have been as many as 650 complaints pertaining to racial discrimination registered with the Delhi Police this year, out of which 139 were converted into FIRs. That is more than a 90 per cent increase from last year. If numbers ever told a story, it is this one. Sadly though, the ground reality is even starker.

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