It has been more than 67 years of our independence and it’s still presumed that the state-nation called India should have by now become a nation-state. But the fact remains that things are far from hunky dory. Indian nationalism remains a building under construction. While one can definitely deal with an identified enemy within and without the border, it is really difficult to nail those living amongst us and masquerading as citizens. There are some citizens who, intentionally or unintentionally, are weakening the evolution of nationalist tendencies in the country.
One of such disturbing developments is the alleged ‘racist behaviour’ among Indians against some of our fellow citizens. The fatal attack on Nido Tania, a young boy from Arunachal Pradesh in a South Delhi market in February this year resulting in his untimely death later, suspicious death of a young Manipuri woman in her flat in South Delhi’s Munirka, the assault on two Nagaland youths in Gurgaon and merciless beating of a Manipuri student leader in Bangalore for not speaking Kannada are some of the recent instances of violence against our fellow citizens from the North East.
As per a study, an estimated two lakh people from the North East have migrated to Delhi between 2005 and 2013 as also have many times more people from the other provinces of India. According to the Union Home Ministry, crimes against the people from the North Eastern states have reportedly gone up by 270 per cent during the past three years. The Home Ministry data also confirm that crimes against people from the North Eastern states increased from 27 in 2011 to 73 in 2013. The crimes that witnessed the highest increase were in keeping with the national pattern though and inter alia included molestation, rape and hurt. While molestation increased by 177 per cent during the period, rape cases increased from one in 2011 to 17 in 2013.
The data give credence to observations by the Government appointed M P Bezbaruah Committee that ‘people from the North Eastern states are racially discriminated against in Delhi’. The 11-member Committee, formed in the wake of the dastardly attack on Arunachal Pradesh student Nido Tania earlier this year, submitted its report to the Government recently where it held that 86 per cent of the North Eastern Indians living in Delhi have faced some sort of racial discrimination. The Committee in its report has stated that people from the North Eastern states faced more problems in Delhi than in other metropolitan cities such as Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata. It also said that over two-thirds of women from North-East had reported that they faced harassment and discrimination in Delhi.
Many citizens from the North-East India have complained that they have been stereotyped by such characterizations as ‘Chinky’, ‘Hakka’, ‘Nepali’, ‘Chinese’ and ‘Chow Mein’ by people in Delhi, with reference to their facial features, particularly the appearance of their eyes.
While the alleged racial discrimination against the North Eastern Indians is a reality, the fact remains that there have been similar reports or incidents of alleged xenophobic attacks and discrimination against Indian citizens of other regions in North East. It is a common knowledge that the migrant workers from Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Orissa or Uttar Pradesh have been subject to a growing degree of xenophobia, racial discrimination, prejudices and violence in the North East. In 2000 and 2003, anti-Bihari violence in North-East led to the deaths of up to 200 people and reportedly generated around 10,000 internally displaced refugees.
Maharashtra has similarly experienced hate campaigns from time to time against people from Hindi speaking states or from South India. But such alleged racial discrimination or harassment is not confined to Indians in states outside their own, but also against people from other nationalities including those from Africa either because of their colour or their features. As a society, we still have not learnt to treat with dignity some of our fellow citizens from amongst us as usually done with the downtrodden Dalits and women.
India is one of the top ten linguistically and culturally diverse countries. We have proudly cherished and celebrated our ‘unity in diversity’. It is to this effect that the Constitution of India guarantees some basic fundamental rights to citizens including ‘prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth’ vide Article 15 or ‘protection of certain rights including the right to move freely throughout the territory of India and to reside and settle in any part of the territory of India’ vide Article 19.
Against this background, what are also needed, apart from strong policing and exemplary punitive measures against such offences, are more institutionalized inter-cultural exchanges and interactions, culture sensitization exercises including inclusion of specific chapters in school syllabus for inculcation of healthy, eclectic and cosmopolitan mind-set and attitude vis-a-vis people from diverse cultures and regions, not to speak of encouraging more inter-caste, inter-regional and inter-faith marriages. We definitely need to outgrow these archaic, anachronistic, pathological, and abhorrent leftovers from our past and build a broader consensus to ensure the emergence of a more tolerant and progressive India from the womb of our nation-building process. The sooner we complete our odyssey from being the state-nation to a nation-state, the better.
