I saw the news about C. Vikram Singh on Tuesday (September 8) morning, and I actually put my phone away for a second. A fifty-four-year-old musician from Manipur lived in Delhi for years and all he did that night was ask some drunk men outside his window to keep the noise down. They beat him for it. His son carried him to the hospital but he succumbed to the beating. I sat with the news for a while before I could make myself keep reading. 

And here is the part that makes me terribly sad. I have read this sentence before. May not be this exact sentence but its twin, its cousin, its echo over and over for more than a decade now. Maybe with a different name in different locality but the same pattern and the same ending. 

I am not ashamed to say that I am tired and exhausted. Tired in a specific way you get when you watch the same tragedy wear a new face every few months and nothing underneath it ever seems to move. Exhausted because grief this repetitive stops feeling like grief and starts feeling like a pattern. Patterns are supposed to be something a society learns from. This one, we don’t seem to. 

So, forgive me the questions, because I don’t know how else to ask it anymore. Is a face, the shape of a person’s eyes, the sound of their name, the place of their birth- still a reason to die in this country? Why does the presence of a Northeastern face so often invite contempt in public space? Why does it still seem possible for some people to believe that a Northeast body is less protected, less respected, more disposable? These are deeply rooted habits of racial thinking. We may not always use the language of race in India but the behaviour, the hierarchy and the treatment are there. The death of Vikram Singh is another brutal reminder that racism in India is lived and can be humiliating and fatal. 

Also read: ‘I Have No Hope in this Govt’: The Lynching of Chongtham Vikram Singh and India’s Growing Taste For Mob Violence

Very often the Northeast is looked at as if something outside the national map of India. That is the first violence. The second is the way that the violence becomes normal. A woman from the Northeast is stared at, a man is mocked for his face, food or clothes or language.........

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