Racism against Northeast Indians

Northeast India covers approximately 262,000 square kilometres and is home to hundreds of distinct ethnic communities, languages, and indigenous traditions.^[1] The region borders China, Myanmar, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Nepal, and is connected to the rest of India by only a narrow land corridor known as the Siliguri Corridor, commonly called the "Chicken's Neck," near Siliguri, which has historically limited economic and social integration with the mainland.^[1] The cultural and phenotypic character of the region is markedly distinct from that of the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian populations that make up the majority of mainland India.^[6] The majority of indigenous peoples of the Northeast belong to what physical anthropologists have classified as the Mongoloid racial type, sharing traits including epicanthic eye folds, flatter nasal bridges, and complexions distinct from typical South Asian features.^[6] This visible difference is widely documented as the primary trigger for the racial othering that Northeast migrants encounter in cities such as Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, and Kolkata.^[2]

Large-scale migration from the Northeast to mainland Indian cities accelerated from the 1990s onwards, driven by limited economic opportunities at home, the presence of armed conflict and militarism in several states, and the pull of better-connected universities and service sector employment.^[1] According to the Bezbaruah Committee report of 2014, more than two lakh (200,000) people from Northeast India had migrated to Delhi alone between 2005 and 2013.^[3] India's economic liberalisation created a notable concentration of Northeast migrants in the retail, hospitality, telecommunications, and wellness sectors, where their bilingualism, familiarity with English, and Western-influenced cultural practices made them commercially desirable employees.^[1]

The roots of the racial othering of Northeast Indians run back to British colonial policy. Colonial administrators deliberately separated the hill territories of the Northeast from the plains of British India through a series of exclusionary laws and spatial demarcations, including the Scheduled Districts Act of 1874 and later the Inner Line Permit system.^[7] These policies treated the indigenous hill peoples as categorically different from the rest of the Indian population, reinforcing boundaries between what colonial ethnography termed "tribal" and "non-tribal" India.^[8] Colonial racial science produced a body of literature classifying the peoples of the region as belonging to a distinct Mongoloid stock, a categorisation that was inherited by post-independence Indian society without critical re-examination.^[2]

Scholars including Thongkholal Haokip have noted that the category of "northeastern" functions in contemporary India as a colonial residue: a catch-all marker of racial difference that flattens the enormous internal diversity of the region into a single, foreign-seeming type.^[2] The India-China War of 1962 added a specifically geopolitical dimension to the racial suspicion directed at Northeast Indians.^[9]

Academic researchers have used the framework of "racial hypervisibility" to describe the experience of Northeast Indians in mainland cities.^[1] Their physical distinctiveness means they are constantly identified, stared at, and targeted in public spaces in ways that other Indian migrants from states such as Bihar or Tamil Nadu are not.^[1] McDuie-Ra describes this as a process of othering driven by phenotypic difference: Northeast migrants' epicanthic eye folds and other East Asian features make them instantly identifiable to mainland Indians as different, and that difference is immediately coded as foreign.^[1]

The most pervasive and daily form of discrimination Northeast Indians face is verbal abuse.^[2] The most commonly deployed slur is "chinky" or "chinki," a term derived from the English word "chink" that targets people of East Asian appearance.^[9] In 2011 the Indian government declared "chinky" a racist term attracting prosecution under the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989.^[3] The Bezbaruah Committee in 2014 specifically noted the routine use of this term and recommended further criminalisation, but as of 2026 no comprehensive anti-racism law incorporating this recommendation has been enacted.^[3]

Other common terms of abuse include "momo" (after the Tibetan-origin dumpling associated with Northeast and Nepali cuisine), "Nepali" used as a reductive catch-all, and "corona" from 2020 onwards.^[2] When Anjel Chakma was attacked in Dehradun in December 2025, his attackers used precisely this cluster of slurs like shouting "Nepali," "Chinese," "Chinki," and "momos" before the assault turned violent.^{[citation needed]}

Beyond slurs related to ethnicity and appearance, Northeast migrants are targeted for their food practices, language, names, and dress.^[1] Eating dog meat or pork, practices common in parts of the Northeast, are used to justify social exclusion.^[10] Speaking languages other than Hindi is treated as evidence of foreignness rather than as the natural consequence of India's vast multilingualism.^[1]

Incidents of physical violence against Northeast Indians have been documented since at least the 1990s, but it was the killing of Nido Tania in January 2014 that brought national attention to the issue.^[4] Tania, a 20-year-old student from Arunachal Pradesh and the son of a state legislator, was beaten to death in the Lajpat Nagar market area of Delhi after shopkeepers mocked his dyed-blonde hair and his ethnic appearance; he died of severe lung and brain injuries.^[11] His death catalysed the formation of the Bezbaruah Committee and prompted the largest public debate about racism in India in the post-independence period.^[4]

His murder was not an isolated incident. Researchers have catalogued comparable cases, including the death of Richard Loitam in Bangalore, a 19-year-old architecture student from Manipur who was found dead in his hostel room in April 2012 following an altercation with fellow students;^[12] the murder of Ramchanphy Hongray, a 19-year-old woman from Manipur who was sexually assaulted, strangled, and burned at her rented apartment in south Delhi in October 2009;^[12] and the suicide of Dana Sangma, an MBA student from Meghalaya, at Amity University in Noida in 2012, following allegations of discriminatory treatment by a university invigilator.

In December 2025, Anjel Chakma, a 24-year-old final-year MBA student from Tripura's Unakoti district, was stabbed by a group of men in the Selaqui area of Dehradun on 9 December after his attackers hurled racial slurs at him and his brother Michael; he died of his injuries on 26 December 2025 after seventeen days in hospital.^[13] Five suspects were arrested and murder charges were added after his death; a public interest litigation was subsequently filed before the Supreme Court of India seeking guidelines to address racial discrimination against Northeast Indians.^[14] The Tripura Legislative Assembly paid formal tribute to Chakma on 23 March 2026.^[15]

In February 2026, three women from Arunachal Pradesh residing in Malviya Nagar, south Delhi, were subjected to racial abuse by a neighbouring couple during a dispute over debris from maintenance work; the altercation, captured on video, included slurs telling the women to "go and sell momos" and describing "northeast people as shit."^[16] The accused couple were arrested by Delhi Police on 25 February 2026 under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.^[17] Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu contacted the Delhi Police Commissioner to demand action and later confirmed the arrests.^[18]

Finding accommodation is one of the most immediately fraught experiences for Northeast migrants arriving in mainland cities.^[1] Landlords routinely refuse housing based on assumptions about the cultural practices and moral character of Northeast tenants, with common justifications including concerns about the consumption of alcohol, hosting members of the opposite sex, cooking food with strong smells, or keeping social hours that violate the norms of the landlord's community.^[3] The Bezbaruah Committee report specifically mentioned that Northeast women face harassment by landlords and property dealers, a finding corroborated by a National Commission for Women-commissioned survey by the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research, which found that 23 percent of Northeast women surveyed had been harassed by landlords or property dealers.^[3]

These refusals push Northeast migrants into a small number of urban neighbourhoods, notably Mukherjee Nagar in Delhi, where a critical mass of the community has already established a presence and landlords have learned that the economic benefits of renting to Northeast tenants outweigh cultural discomfort.^[1] While this clustering provides social support and a degree of insulation from hostility, it also reproduces the spatial segregation that marks marginalised communities in cities worldwide.^[1]

Northeast migrants are heavily concentrated in low-wage service sector work, including malls, call centres, restaurants, salons, and spas.^[1] McDuie-Ra's ethnographic research demonstrates that their cultural capital, including English proficiency, cosmopolitan taste, and familiarity with Western consumer culture, is extracted and monetised in neoliberal service spaces, while outside those spaces they remain racialised outsiders: employed precisely because their cultural difference is commercially useful, and simultaneously marginalised because that same difference marks them as racially inferior in the broader social order.^[1]

The volume edited by Venkat Pulla, Rituparna Bhattacharyya, and Sanjai Bhatt (2020) explores how Northeast migrants are stereotyped as "backwards, anti-national, anti-assimilationist, and immoral" and are consequently relegated to low-status positions even when their qualifications would justify better employment.^[10] Several studies note a pattern of lower wages for Northeast workers performing the same tasks as their mainland Indian counterparts, and many face difficulty accessing part-time jobs despite universities making internships mandatory.^[10]

One of the most extensively documented dimensions of racism against Northeast Indians is its specifically gendered expression toward women.^[19] Northeast Indian women face a form of discrimination that operates at the intersection of race and gender, producing a set of stereotypes and behaviours qualitatively distinct from those directed at Northeast Indian men.^[2] The North East Support Centre and Helpline, established in New Delhi in 2007 as a wing of the All India Christian Council, was specifically founded to address this combination of racial and gender violence, recognising that existing institutional frameworks were inadequate to address it.^[20]

The most pervasive and damaging stereotype directed at Northeast Indian women in mainland cities is the assumption that they are sexually available, morally loose, or promiscuous.^[2] This stereotype is rooted in several overlapping factors: the greater social autonomy that women from many Northeast communities have historically exercised, their adoption of Western fashion and social norms, and a racialising male gaze that globally tends to code women of East and Southeast Asian appearance as exotic and sexually accessible.^[9] The framing of women as prostitutes or as sexually available means that harassment is frequently rationalised by perpetrators and sometimes by authorities as a misunderstanding rather than as violence.^[2] In the Malviya Nagar incident of February 2026, the accused woman directed the slur "dhandhewali" (meaning a woman engaged in prostitution) at the three Arunachali tenants, a direct example of the sexualised nature of racial abuse directed at Northeast women.^[16]

A survey by the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research, commissioned by the National Commission for Women, found that 29 percent of Northeast women in four metropolitan cities reported harassment and molestation, and 42 percent reported verbal abuse; sixty percent of Northeast women surveyed in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Bangalore had faced some form of harassment or discrimination.^[3]

During the COVID-19 pandemic the sexual stereotype explicitly merged with the disease stereotype, producing a formulation in which Northeast women were described simultaneously as promiscuous and as biological threats.^[21] The continuity of the language of contamination and pollution across both framings reveals the structural logic at work: Northeast women's bodies are imagined as fundamentally impure in mainland social discourse, whether morally or microbiologically, and their presence in mainland space is constructed as transgressive.^[21]

Northeast women report routine sexual harassment in public spaces, on buses and metro trains, in markets, and on streets near their neighbourhoods.^[21] Survey participants quoted in journalism and academic research recall being harassed by men on Delhi Transport Corporation buses while commuting, being propositioned as sex workers, and being physically approached or followed on the street.^[3] Women who have sought police assistance have in several documented cases been actively discouraged from filing formal complaints, creating a double bind in which harassment is common and institutional recourse is unreliable.^[21]

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically worsened the situation for Northeast Indians in mainland cities.^[2] Because Northeast Indians share phenotypic features with East Asian populations, they were targeted as presumed carriers of the virus from the earliest weeks of the pandemic.^[2] Research published in Asian Ethnicity by Haokip (2021) documents a systematic upsurge in racist incidents directed at Northeast Indians beginning in February 2020, arguing that the pandemic reinforced rather than created racism against the group, which the country had been grappling with for at least a decade.^[2]

Documented incidents included a woman from Manipur being spat on in a Delhi street while being called "corona," a student being shouted at in a market with the words "Get lost, it is because of you people that coronavirus has come," and Northeast students being denied entry to grocery stores.^[2] A 2022 study based on qualitative interviews with nineteen Northeast residents of Delhi, conducted during the first wave of the pandemic, found that the outbreak had exacerbated othering and produced new forms of stigmatisation, insecurity, and mental and emotional strain.^[21]

The Rights and Risks Analysis Group (RRAG), a New Delhi-based civil rights organisation, published Coronavirus Pandemic: India's Mongoloid Looking People Face Upsurge of Racism (2020), cataloguing 22 hate crimes and incidents of racial prejudice between 7 February and 25 March 2020 alone.^[22] The report concluded that the pandemic had removed the thin layer of social restraint that sometimes governs the expression of racial hostility in everyday life, but that the underlying structural racism predated the pandemic by decades.^[22]

The most significant formal institutional response to racism against Northeast Indians in the post-independence period was the M.P. Bezbaruah Committee, established in February 2014 by the Ministry of Home Affairs following the killing of Nido Tania.^[23] The committee, chaired by retired IAS officer M.P. Bezbaruah, was tasked with examining discrimination and safety concerns facing Northeast people living outside their home region and recommending corrective measures; it submitted its report to the Ministry of Home Affairs on 11 July 2014.^[3] The committee estimated that 86 percent of the over 200,000 Northeast migrants in Delhi had experienced discrimination.^[3]

Its key recommendations included the enactment of a specific anti-discrimination law or an amendment to the Indian Penal Code to address racial discrimination explicitly; making racially motivated offences cognisable and non-bailable; establishing a Special Police Unit for North Eastern Region (SPUNER); setting up fast-track courts for racially motivated crimes; and integrating Northeast history, culture, and society into school and university curricula nationwide.^[3]

Most of these recommendations have not been implemented.^[24] Following the death of Anjel Chakma, the Tipra Motha Party demanded the enactment of a dedicated anti-racial violence law, with party spokespersons stating that the lack of such legislation had allowed discrimination and racially motivated violence to persist unchecked.^[25] The same recommendations that the Bezbaruah Committee had made in 2014 were again cited by members of Parliament, civil society organisations, and political leaders in early 2026 following the Malviya Nagar incident.^[26]