I was born and I am being brought up in one of the most
important cities in India. According to all the Indians I have met I
look like a ‘normal Indian’. Till a few years back, I seemed to
understand the accurate definition of this phrase, but then one
day I came across the horrible and disheartening truth. Another
girl who was brought up in the same city as mine was being
bullied for not looking Indian. She was clearly exhausted of
answering questions, telling everyone that she is an Indian from
the north east of India and she was exhausted and disturbed by
facing racial discrimination. Slurs like ‘chinki’, ‘chini’, etc are being
associated with them. The new slur that people have started using
is ‘corona’. To look at how insensitive people get is really sad.
People think that using these slurs is completely alright and the
people they are associating with these slurs agree to it. People
use these slurs as a joke and humiliate them. Have you ever
imagined what goes on in their mind? The other day a woman
residing in mainland India was narrating an incident that
happened with her on social media: “ I was walking in the park
when some kids playing saw me yelled ‘corona, corona’ and ran
away from there”. They feel degraded, humiliated and even
depressed at times.
People have gone so low to discriminate them that in 2012 the
Indian government asked all its states and union territories to
arrest anyone who commits an act of atrocity towards north east
Indians under the SC and ST [Prevention of atrocities] Act, 1989.
How many of us even knew about this?
I am sure that a lot of us also don’t know how badly the north east
Indians get harassed, beaten and abused. People spit on them to
insult them. Some people also target north East Indian women
saying they are ‘easy’. In 2014, a student, Nido Taniam from north
east India was killed in New Delhi. Two women from Manipur
were assaulted, a north East Indian student was beaten in
Bangalore for not speaking Kannada and a second one was beaten
in Gurgoan, Haryana. All of this was reported in one year.
Possibility of many unreported cases exists. At some work places
in mainland India, north east Indians are not given proper
opportunities like the rest. When they casually go out and have to
hear offensive comments, they don’t stand up for themselves
because they are afraid of being in grave danger. When we go as
tourists to seven sisters, they treat us with hospitality, but when
they come to our cities, our states for better education and better
experience, they suffer. They feel left out, isolated and they are
forcefully given the tag of outsiders when they are not. Where
they come from is in India, they consider themselves Indian. They
sing the same national anthem like us.
Since the pandemic, they have been forced to move out of their
rental homes and have been hearing offensive comments
consistently. It’s hard to even think how left out and dangerous
they have to feel in their own country. If you think this problem
will go away as generations pass, you are wrong. We have to
eradicate it and we have to start now. We have to give this the
importance we have been giving to other social movements like
Black Lives Matter, Pride Month and Nepotism in movie industry.
We have to start educating ourselves, people younger than us and
even people elder to us. Let’s prove this as a time of real changes.
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