Racism against Northeast Indians

Racism against Northeast Indians refers to racial prejudice, discrimination, physical violence, sexual harassment, and systematic exclusion directed at people from the eight states of northeastern India: Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura, when they migrate to live, work, or study in other parts of India, commonly referred to as the "mainland." The phenomenon has been documented in academic literature, government reports, legal proceedings, and journalistic accounts. Despite constitutional guarantees of equality and freedom of movement under Articles 14, 15, and 19, and periodic political attention following high-profile incidents of violence, the problem has persisted into the 2020s.

The most significant government response came in 2014 with the formation of the Bezbaruah Committee, established by the Ministry of Home Affairs following the killing of Nido Taniam, a student from Arunachal Pradesh who died after shopkeepers in a Lajpat Nagar market in Delhi beat him in response to taunts about his ethnic appearance. The committee's recommendations, including the enactment of a specific anti-discrimination law and the establishment of fast-track courts for racially motivated crimes, have largely not been implemented.

Background

Northeast India covers approximately 262,000 square kilometres and is home to hundreds of distinct ethnic communities, languages, and indigenous traditions. 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. 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. According to the Bezbaruah Committee report of 2014, more than 200,000 people from Northeastern India had migrated to Delhi alone between 2005 and 2013. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. The Sino-Indian War of 1962 added a specifically geopolitical dimension to the racial suspicion directed at Northeast Indians. Academic researchers have also used the framework of "racial hypervisibility" to describe the experience of Northeast Indians in mainland cities. 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. McDuie-Ra describes this as a process of othering driven by differences in physical appearance from mainland Indians: northeast migrants' epicanthic eye folds and other features make them instantly identifiable to mainland Indians as different, and that difference is immediately coded as foreign. 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.

Forms of discrimination

Racial slurs and verbal abuse

The most pervasive and daily form of discrimination Northeast Indians face is verbal abuse. The most commonly deployed slur is "chinky" or "chinki," a term derived from the English word "chink". In 2011 the Indian government declared "chinky" a racist term attracting prosecution under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. The Bezbaruah Committee in 2014 specifically noted the routine use of this term and recommended further criminalisation.

Other common terms of abuse include "momo" (after the Tibetan-origin dumpling associated with Northeast and Nepalese cuisine), "Nepali" is used as a reductive catch-all, and "corona" from 2020 onwards.

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

Physical violence and hate crimes

Incidents of physical violence against Northeast Indians have been documented since at least the 1990s, but it was the killing of Nido Taniam in January 2014 that brought national attention to the issue. Taniam, 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. His death catalysed the formation of the Bezbaruah Committee and prompted the largest public debate about racism in India in the post-independence period.

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; 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; 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. 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. The Tripura Legislative Assembly paid formal tribute to Chakma on 23 March 2026.

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." The accused couple were arrested by Delhi Police on 25 February 2026 under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu contacted the Delhi Police Commissioner to demand action and later confirmed the arrests.

Housing discrimination

Finding accommodation is one of the most immediately fraught experiences for Northeast migrants arriving in mainland cities. 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. 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% of Northeast women surveyed had been harassed by landlords or property dealers.

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. 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.

Workplace discrimination and economic exclusion

Northeast migrants are heavily concentrated in low-wage service sector work, including malls, call centres, restaurants, salons, and spas. 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 service spaces, while outside those spaces they remain racialised outsiders.

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. 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.

Sexual harrasment

Duncan McDuie-Ra, Professor of Development Studies at the University of New South Wales, observed in his 2012 ethnographic study Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail that commercial visibility placed Northeast women in sustained contact with mainland India. The most frequently cited stereotype underlying Northeast Indian women is the perception that they are sexually promiscuous and exotic. Researchers have identified several cultural factors that feed the stereotype: the comparatively greater social autonomy women from many Northeast communities exercise; their adoption of Western fashion including jeans, short skirts, and sleeveless tops; and social practices such as eating out, drinking alcohol socially, and keeping later hours, all of which are normative in parts of the Northeast but read as sexually transgressive by many in mainland North India.

A survey commissioned by the National Commission for Women found that 29 percent of Northeast women in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Bangalore had experienced harassment and molestation, and 42 percent had experienced verbal abuse; sixty percent had faced some form of harassment or discrimination overall. Women reported being propositioned as sex workers by strangers, being followed by men making sexual comments, and receiving unwanted attention on Delhi Transport Corporation buses during commutes.

McDuie-Ra noted that some Northeast women in Delhi's service sector were aware of how their perceived exoticism was monetised by employers and were able to negotiate better wages or working conditions as a result of their commercial desirability. However, researchers have cautioned that such strategies operate within and do not dismantle the underlying structure of fetishisation.

The COVID-19 pandemic produced a shift in the stereotyping of Northeast women. Haokip (2021) argued that the pandemic period demonstrated how the sexual stereotyping of Northeast women is not a fixed set of perceptions but a flexible framework that absorbs whatever anxieties are culturally salient at a given moment, shifting from a framing centred on sexual morality to one incorporating biological contamination without abandoning the earlier layer.

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. 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.

COVID-19 pandemic

Main article: Xenophobia and racism related to the COVID-19 pandemic § India

The COVID-19 pandemic worsened the situation for Northeast Indians in mainland cities. Because Northeast Indians share physical features with East Asian populations, they were targeted as presumed carriers of the virus from the earliest weeks of the pandemic. 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.

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. 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.

The Rights and Risks Analysis Group (RRAG), a New Delhi-based civil rights organisation catalogued 22 hate crimes and incidents of racial prejudice between 7 February and 25 March 2020 alone. 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.

Institutional and legal responses

A recurring theme in accounts of racism against Northeast Indians is the reluctance of mainland Indians to recognise the phenomenon as racism at all. The word "racism" carries political weight in Indian discourse; it is primarily associated with the colonial history of India and understood as something that white Europeans did to Indians, and applying the same term to intra-Indian relations is resisted by many. Incidents are frequently reframed as misunderstandings, cultural friction, or random violence rather than as racially motivated harm.

Police frequently decline to register cases of racial harassment as hate crimes, and Northeast victims have in several documented cases been discouraged from pursuing formal complaints.

Bezbaruah Committee (2014)

Main article: Bezbaruah Committee

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 Taniam. 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. The committee estimated that 86% of the over 200,000 Northeast migrants in Delhi had experienced discrimination.

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. Most of these recommendations have not been implemented.

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.

See also

• Axone, a 2019 comedy-drama film about Northeast Indian migrants in Delhi
• Racism in India
• Historical definitions of races in India
• Ethnic relations in India
• Caste system in India
• Human rights in India
• Anti-Bengali sentiment
• 2023–2025 Manipur violence