It came as something of a surprise to many in India and around the world, who are familiar with the image of Shillong as the cool, hipsterish city of rock’n’roll love and Bob Dylan tribute gigs, when the city suddenly erupted into violence over what began as an altercation over parking between two or three individuals. The identity of the parties involved, Dalit Sikhs on the one hand and local Khasi tribals on the other, added to the surprise. What was going on?

Perhaps the right place to start with an answer is at the beginning, a long time ago. The idea of Shillong as a little town tucked away in a remote corner is, in my opinion, incorrect. Shillong began life as a cosmopolitan town. In 1874, when the province of Assam including the Khasi, Garo, Jaintia, Naga and Lushai Hills and Sylhet, Cachar and Goalpara were separated from Bengal Presidency by the British, the town became the capital of a vast territory. The territory ruled from Shillong grew further in 1905 when, after the first attempt to divide Bengal on religious lines between a Hindu West Bengal and a Muslim East Bengal was carried out by the colonial British administration, a new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam came into being. Shillong became the summer capital and Dhaka the winter capital of a territory extending over most of what are now Northeast India and Bangladesh. People of various castes, tribes, and ethnicities came to this town in the Khasi Hills from all over undivided India as a matter of course and made their homes there.

The reconfiguring of this cosmopolitan space as a narrowly defined ethnic space happened in stages. After the Partition of India in 1947, when Sylhet, whose border is less than 100 km from Shillong, went to East Pakistan in a close and controversial referendum, the existing Bengali population in the city was swelled by a wave of refugees. The city was then the capital of undivided Assam, and the politics of “Bongal kheda” or “chase out the Bongals” that began in Assam as a reaction to the influx naturally had an influence in the capital. Though riots against the Bengalis occurred in Assam in the 1960s, Shillong however remained relatively unaffected.

After the successful hill state movement led to the separation of the Khasi, Garo and Jaintia Hills from Assam to form the new state of Meghalaya in 1972, a large proportion of the Assamese middle classes left Shillong for Assam’s new capital of Guwahati. The Bengalis, who dominated middle class jobs, and were mostly refugees from East Bengal, having no homes elsewhere, stayed put. The first major riots in Shillong, in 1979, by Khasi mobs, were directed mainly against this local Bengali minority and aimed to drive them out. There was and still remains a fear among many small communities of Northeast India of being overwhelmed by outsiders, and this fear has been at the root of xenophobic politics in the region for decades.

Through the 1980s rioting continued sporadically. In 1987 there were curfews for a whole year. Those were dark days in Shillong’s life as a city. All outsiders, locally referred to as dkhars in the Khasi language, were targets. The mobs did not distinguish between Bengalis, Nepalis, Marwaris, Sindhis, Biharis or Punjabis in their generalised xenophobia. They certainly did not bother then and still do not bother now whether the outsider is a Dalit or a Brahmin, a Sikh, Hindu or Muslim. The dividing line that counted then and counts even now is between the tribal and the non-tribal. Then finer divisions kick in; there are distinctions between the Khasi, Garo and Jaintia tribes of Meghalaya and other Northeast tribes, and further internal dividing lines between and within each of these tribes. So religion, for instance, kicks in as a factor within the tribe, which may have adherents of different religious traditions.

The violence against outsiders continued into the 1990s with houses burnt and people murdered and raped. Entire Bengali and Nepali populations were ethnically cleansed out and became internal refugees. Most of the Bengalis, who had been displaced once by Partition, were now forced out of home and hearth a second time. Many moved to West Bengal or the Barak Valley of Assam. The Nepalis migrated to places such as Darjeeling. Marwari and Sindhi businessmen became targets of extortion by militant groups that in reality were little more than criminal gangs hiding behind a fig leaf of ethnic chauvinism. Some fled to safer places.

It was through the efforts of two capable Home Ministers of Meghalaya, Thrang Rangad and later, Robert G Lyngdoh that the militancy, whose slogan “Khasi by blood, Indian by accident” was at one time painted in large letters on the walls of the state legislative Assembly, came to be checked. A change of government in Bangladesh in 2008 that robbed all militant groups of the region from safe havens and Bangladeshi and Pakistani intelligence support there finally turned the tide of militancy in the Northeast.

The return of Shillong to its present status of cool cosmopolitan rock town mainly happened after that, in a decade since 2008.

The sudden eruption of violence against the Dalit Sikhs was a brief and unexpected flash of its now hidden dark side. The rapid escalation of an altercation between two or three individuals into a situation that shut the city down may have had something to do with covert assistance from powerful players in state politics. The Congress won a seat in the recent bypolls, taking its tally to 21, and making it the single largest party in the state assembly of 60 members. The current government is led by the National People’s Party which has 20 seats. After coming to power in Karnataka, the Congress had declared it would stake claim in other places where it is the single largest party. Reliable sources say there were efforts behind the scenes to topple the Meghalaya government.

Majoritarian politics of various kinds exist in this country, and there are chauvinists of multiple hues. Punjab had its Khalistanis and the Northeast has its endless alphabet soup of militant groups, most of which base their movements on ethnic nationalism that shades into racism. The rhetoric of “pure blood” is often heard from such groups. Only those of “pure blood” are believed by these groups to be true sons of the soil, with rights to live there. Anywhere else in India and in most places in the world, this would be seen as Nazism. In the case of the Northeast, it is overlooked or romanticised.

Without a more even-handed approach to people of all castes and communities, and an appreciation of the fact that different majorities – and hence, different minorities – exist in different places, Shillong and India in general will continue to see sudden eruptions of communal violence against whichever group is configured as the ‘other’ in a particular place.