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Imagine waking up in a city that is supposed to be yours. You have come here chasing a dream: to crack the civil services examination conducted by Union Public Service Commission (UPSC), to sit across an interview panel one day and serve the very nation you were born to. You make chai in a small fourth- floor flat. You call an electrician to fix the air conditioner. While fixing, dust falls. And then, without warning, your entire humanity is reduced to a slur.

– That is what happened in Malviya Nagar, Delhi, on February 20,2026.

Three young women from Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur, one of them preparing rigorously for the civil services examination, became the target of a torrent of racial abuse at the hands of their neighbours, Harsh Singh and his wife Ruby Jain. What began as a complaint about drilling dust escalating from the fourth floor became a masterclass in cruelty. The accused couple reportedly call the women ‘momo’, ‘sex workers’, ‘parlour ladies’ and ‘drug addicts.’

Ruby Jain was heard saying, in Hindi, that the women worked at massage parlours for five hundred rupees. She asked them to ‘go and sell momos.’ Her husband reportedly called them ‘gutter chaap (trash or uncivilsed)’ and declared that ‘northeast people are shit.’ A video of the altercation went viral on social media, sparking national outrage. An FIR has been lodged against the couple under sections of the BNS sections 79, 351(2), 3(5) and 196 including those pertaining to outraging the woman’s modesty and promoting enmity on grounds of race. As of this writing, no arrests have been made.

One of the victims, in the video, says something which is impossible to ignore:

“We are as much Indian as anyone else. Why are we treated like outsiders just because we are from the Northeast? We, too, have the right to live with equality and dignity.”

“We are as much Indian as anyone else. Why are we treated like outsiders just because we are from the Northeast? We, too, have the right to live with equality and dignity.”

She is right. And the fact that she even has to say it, the fact that it needs to be stated aloud, in the capital of a democracy, is the indictment.

This is not a new story. It is, depressingly, an old one in new clothes.

In 2014, a twenty-year-old from Arunachal........

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