The Pulse | Society | South Asia

India’s Refusal to Acknowledge Its Racist Prejudices

Name-calling and violence against youth from the country’s Northeast in India’s cities stem from deep racial prejudice.

Screenshot of a video of a protest by Northeast students at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, India, on Dec. 31, 2025, seeking justice for Anjel Chakma, a student from Tripura, who was killed in Dehradun because of his identity.

This month alone, New Delhi, India’s cosmopolitan capital city, saw three incidents of racial attacks and racial abuse targeting citizens from the country’s Northeastern states. All three incidents occurred in posh South Delhi and not in some outlying suburb.

While casteism and caste discrimination are officially recognized as crimes and categorized as penal offenses under India’s laws, the blatant and widespread racial discrimination against Indian citizens from the Northeast continues to be overlooked.

India’s Northeast comprises the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura. This is a predominantly hilly region that is not only geographically remote from the rest of the country but also economically deprived and hardly integrated into the mainstream. The physical features of the Northeastern peoples are different from those in the rest of India.

This has prompted them to be described as “Chinki” and “Chinese” – both pejorative references to their small eyes, “foreign” looks, and supposed alienness. Racial prejudice underlies such perceptions, which are widespread and normalized across the rest of India. Such prejudice often manifests in name-calling, bullying, and even violence. Students from the Northeast are often denied accommodation in India’s metropolitan cities, due to their food habits — they are shunned for eating “stinky and blood-laced meat.”

On March 8, two young women, one from Manipur and the other from Assam, were walking near the Saket court complex in New Delhi, when a group of men assaulted them. The men had hurled racist and lewd slurs at the two women, and when one of the women objected to this, they were physically assaulted with belts.

The same evening, in a separate incident, a group of women from the Northeast were racially abused and attacked in Malviya Nagar, also in South Delhi. Police cases have been registered in both incidents.

Just days earlier, a video of three Arunachali women, now living in Delhi’s Malviya Nagar, being racially abused and insulted by their neighbors went viral. The women were getting some electrical repairs done in their flat when an argument ensued over debris that fell into the flat below. Harsh Singh and his wife, Ruby Jain, who were living in the flat below, can be seen in the video abusing the three women in vile language. They called the women “momos” (a popular snack in the Northeast), and referred to them as “massage parlor girls who worked for 500 rupees ($5)” — a euphemism for sex work, and alleged that they were running that “business” from their home.

The women refused to be cowed down by the couple’s intimidation, confronted them and demanded an apology. “They started targeting the Northeast. They kept saying that Northeastern people are illiterate. They even threatened to beat me up,” one of the women told news agency PTI. A police case has been lodged against the couple.

Recently, the Supreme Court of India acknowledged the increasing incidence of violence against Northeastern students. In response to a petition demanding a specific law against racial attacks on the lines of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, the apex court said that those who attack people for their appearance, language, race, region, or place of origin must be dealt with an iron hand. While disposing of the petition, the court asked the attorney general to look into the matter.

The petition, a public interest litigation, was filed in the wake of the fatal stabbing of 24-year-old male........

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