Why Racism Against Northeasterners Refuses to Go Away

A group of five men brutally assaulted a young MBA student from Tripura in Uttarakhand. After battling for life for nearly two weeks in a hospital, he succumbed to his injuries (Read here). As the news spread on social media, the assault was rightly condemned by many, including the Chief Ministers of the Northeastern states, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, student organisations, and ordinary citizens. Yet, as necessary as this outrage is, it must also be accompanied by a sobering recognition. This racial attack was not an aberration.

Persistence of Racism

Racist violence against people from Northeast India in Indian cities has a long history. Such incidents have been reported since at least the 1980s and have become more visible as migration from the region has increased following economic liberalization. The early 2010s were particularly revealing. In August 2012, rumours of impending attacks triggered a mass exodus of Northeastern migrants from cities such as Bengaluru and Pune. Two years later, in Delhi, a 19-year-old student from Arunachal Pradesh, Nido Tania, was beaten to death for something as trivial as his hairstyle. His murder sparked widespread protests and forced a rare public conversation on racism in India. Yet, it did not mark an end. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people from the Northeast were routinely abused and mocked as “corona,” exposing how fragile and superficial that conversation had been.

If racism has persisted for decades, what sustains it? During my PhD fieldwork, many respondents, including police officers, social activists, lawyers, and community leaders, pointed to cultural ignorance as the primary explanation. In response, both government agencies and Northeastern communities have invested heavily in cultural outreach, with the stated aim of bridging a perceived cultural gap.

Have these efforts worked? The answer is complicated. Some scholars distinguish between what may be called "footnote racism" and "front-page racism". Footnote racism refers to everyday practices such as stereotyping, slurs, and casual name-calling that often go unnoticed or unreported. Front-page racism refers to more extreme and violent acts, such as physical assault and murder, which force their way into public attention.

A related distinction can be drawn between institutional and street-level racism. Institutional racism operates in relatively structured spaces such as universities, workplaces, and police stations, where formal rules and accountability mechanisms exist. Street-level racism unfolds in anonymous public spaces where people encounter strangers with little restraint or consequence. Awareness programs and sensitization efforts have had limited success in institutional settings. On the streets, however, they have largely failed. It is only when racism escalates into front-page violence, as in the killing of Anjel Chakma, that the wider public is jolted into acknowledging its persistence.

Structures and Stereotypes

It is often argued that racism against Northeasterners occurs because they are misidentified as “foreigners.” Anjel Chakma’s last words—“I am Indian”—painfully reflect the power of this assumption. Yet this explanation is inadequate. People from the Northeast are subjected to racism, particularly in its most brutal and visible forms, not primarily because they are mistaken for foreigners, but because they are correctly identified as Northeasterners—and thus as a particular kind of Indian. In mainland cities, they are marked as “outsiders.” This is not to deny that they are also misidentified as foreigners in many contexts. However, racially motivated physical assaults against actual foreigners are too costly, which makes their frequency relatively limited. By contrast, when landlords charge higher rents or vendors demand extra money from a Northeasterner, they do so not out of confusion but knowingly. These acts are based on knowing who the person is and not mistaking them for someone else.

This logic closely resembles violence against religious minorities or lower castes, who are targeted precisely because they are identified as such. This is not to suggest that identification automatically produces discrimination, but most racist perceptions and practices are structured around this act of marking. Further, when Northeasterners are called “Chinese” or “Nepalese,” they are not being misidentified in any innocent sense. These terms function as slurs. Much like caste names used against Dalits and other lower castes, their purpose is not description but degradation.

At the heart of this problem lies the power of cultural stereotypes produced within the structural framework of Indian society. These are not merely personal prejudices but socially shared ways of seeing that shape how people interpret the world around them. By simplifying social complexity, stereotypes provide ready-made categories that guide everyday judgment and behaviour. People from Northeast India are especially vulnerable to this process because the region sits at the intersection of multiple social structures, such as tribe and caste, physical appearance, language, food habits, and everyday cultural practices that do not easily fit dominant "mainland" norms. Therefore, they are routinely subjected to moral and social policing, and racial discrimination, both subtle and violent.

Limits of Public Policy

Recognising the scale of the problem, the Ministry of Home Affairs constituted a twelve-member committee in 2014 under the chairmanship of M. P. Bezbaruah to examine the challenges faced by people from the Northeast in major cities. The committee proposed interventions at two interconnected levels. At the national level, it recommended increasing public awareness of the Northeast by enhancing its visibility in mainstream media, incorporating substantial content on the region in school textbooks and university curricula, naming public spaces after prominent Northeastern figures, promoting employment opportunities, and supporting sports, tourism, and cultural production, including film-making in the region.

At the metropolitan level, particularly in Delhi, which remains the primary destination for migrants from the Northeast, the report proposed a range of institutional and cultural measures. These included establishing a dedicated Northeast Centre in the capital, organising annual Northeast cultural festivals, strengthening Northeast student societies on university campuses, improving policing and legal support through mechanisms such as the Special Police Unit for the North Eastern Region, and encouraging private-sector participation in employment, safety, and cultural initiatives. These measures aimed not only to address immediate concerns of safety and discrimination but also to reshape how the Northeast is represented within the national imagination.

However, despite being one of the most comprehensive governmental efforts to address racism against Northeastern communities, the report also reveals its own limitations. Racism is framed largely as a problem of ignorance and cultural misunderstanding, based on the assumption that greater visibility and representation will automatically lead to social acceptance. It did not examine the social structure that produces racism. Equally troubling is the gap between recommendation and implementation. Many recommendations have been adopted only partially or in a symbolic manner. While the Special Police Unit for the North Eastern Region exists in the national capital, its reach and effectiveness remain limited. More importantly, the long-standing demand for a specific law to address racial discrimination has not materialised. Existing provisions under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita remain inadequate to address racism as a structural and everyday reality.

If racism against Northeasterners is to be addressed meaningfully, it cannot be reduced to a problem of cultural unfamiliarity alone. It requires confronting the unequal social order within which stereotypes acquire their power and within which violence continues to recur with disturbing regularity.