From Nido Tania to Anjel Chakma — India is still dodging the question of racism

The death of Tripura student Anjel Chakma following an alleged racist attack in Uttarakhand has brought back memories, for many in and from Northeast India, of the killing of Arunachal student Nido Tania in Delhi in 2014. Then, as now, a young man from Northeast India studying in a part of the “mainland” had died following an assault by a group of men after a fight that erupted from comments related to his appearance. 

That incident was followed by the formation of the M.P. Bezbaruah Committee to address the concerns of people from the Northeast living in other parts of the country.

The Committee had recommended the enactment of a law to address racial discrimination, but that has not happened so far, perhaps because of India's unease with issues of race. The demand for such a law is now back. A public interest petition has also been filed in the Supreme Court to press for court intervention in framing guidelines to prevent racial attacks.

News reports of discrimination against people from the Northeast appear in the Indian media now and then. The stories they tell tend to speak of ordinary, everyday situations marked by casual racism, typically characterised as teasing or jest by the perpetrators, that spiral out of control. If the victims are men, the incident may turn to violence, sometimes, as in Chakma’s and Tania’s cases, with fatal consequences. If they are women, sexual harassment or worse may follow.

Whatever the details of the latest case – the Uttarakhand police have claimed that it was not a racist attack, although the deceased’s family disputes this – the fact that discrimination based on physical appearance and skin colour exists in India and in the world at large is indisputable.

It existed in 2014, for centuries before that, and still exists today.

It is less talked about nowadays than many other forms of discrimination, which is curious, because it is still arguably the main dividing line in the world between the predominantly white “West” and the rest. This dividing line runs within countries and between them; white Americans have more privilege than black ones even now, 160 years after the end of slavery, just as the countries of colonisers still have more privilege than the lands of the colonised.

Here in India, the existence of racially defined stereotypes of appearance has always been a lived reality in every part of the country. The admiration for fair skin, the slurs directed at Africans because of dark skin colour, and the taunts thrown at people of East Asian appearance, whether they are from Northeast India, Nepal, or elsewhere, are social realities known to all.

That kind of discrimination has also, unfortunately, been present in Northeast India, where the attitudes towards white and black skin are similar to those in mainland India. The key difference is that instead of people of East Asian appearance being discriminated against, it is people of South Asian appearance who have periodically faced mob violence there.

The fault line between India’s Northeast and its surroundings largely coincides with an imaginary line drawn by British colonial policymakers, separating the hills inhabited by tribes of East Asian racial types from the surrounding plains inhabited by people who look South Asian.

A large part of those surrounding plains is in Bangladesh. India’s longest land border is with Bangladesh, which shares boundaries with four Northeast states – Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Assam. The issue of “Bangladeshi” migration has been around there long before the formation of Bangladesh in 1971.

There were riots in Assam dating back to the 1950s and 1960s, and mob violence in Meghalaya in 1987, 1991, and 1992, aimed at evicting “foreigners”. Out on the streets during those troubled times, the markers of suspicion typically began with physical appearance. People who “looked Bangladeshi” were prone to being targeted; being speakers of the Bengali language was a confirmatory test. The violence eventually morphed into generalised attacks led by armed extremist groups against mainland Indian communities such as Biharis and Marwaris.

A similar kind of racial discrimination has long been around in the only other country that borders Bangladesh, which is Myanmar.

The fault line there, too, is arguably rooted in racial differences.

The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya as suspected Bangladeshi immigrants has enjoyed the support of not just the country’s military juntas, past and present, but also, less overtly, that of the democratically elected government of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.

Before the Rohingyas, who are labelled “Bengali kala” by the Burmese, it was the Indians who were ethnically cleansed. Roughly half a million Indians were forcibly evicted from Myanmar after that country’s independence in 1948.

The Burmese call Indians “kala” or “kalar”, a term with derogatory racial connotations. Like the Khasi word “dkhar”, or the Assamese word “bongal”, it was arguably a term that could be used for all outsiders or foreigners. In practice, it was more specific; a white man was not a “kala” any more than he was a “dkhar”. “Bongal kheda” in Assam in 1960 did not target white people.

The word “Chinki”, directed in mainland India at Northeasterners, is the inverse of that – a word implying Chinese, thrown not at Chinese people, but at anyone of East Asian appearance in general. Like the words “momo” or “kala”, it is not by itself a “bad word”. It is, however, felt as an abuse by those at the receiving end of it.

Conversely, among close friends in casual settings, terms of abuse can flow freely without anyone feeling bad about it. From a stranger, even an otherwise harmless word may be felt as a grave insult. This is perhaps because the meanings of words are not wholly found in the dictionary, but in the perceived intent of the speaker.

There is no solution to be found in banning offending words. It would be stupid to ban the word “momo” in the hope that this would stop racist jibes; the word “thukpa” might have to be banned next, and so on. Nor is policing intent a feasible solution, as that would open the door to arrests for “thought crimes”.

The problem lies in racial discrimination itself. 

Chakma, the young man killed in Uttarakhand, was from the Chakma tribe, a community whose traditional lands in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh have been taken over by Bangladeshi settlers. 

Bangladesh and its predecessor, East Pakistan, have a history of violence and ethnic cleansing against not just its religious minorities, of which there is much talk in India, but also its racial minorities – specifically, its indigenous tribes such as the Chakma and Tripuri, who also inhabit parts of neighbouring Northeast India.

Racial discrimination is as much a reality in Asia and the world as religious discrimination. 

It is time for us to accept this reality and begin to address it.

The writer is co-editor of ‘Insider Outsider: Belonging and Unbelonging in Northeast India’ and ‘But I Am One of You: Northeast India and the Struggle to Belong’.

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