Racial ideology in Indian society, though not recognized by the government or academic circles, is experienced on a daily basis by people from the north-east in mainland India. With the deaths of Richard Loitam in Bangalore and Dana Sangma in Gurgaon in April 2012, the accumulation of experiences and the availability of strong informal communication channels catalyzed protests for justice and against racism.
These articulations need to be strengthened, deepened and sustained through scholarly attention. At the same time, the north-east needs to examine mainland cultures through its own lens, to create fundamental transformations in the relationship between the two.
Scary exodus
A Mizo game developer, Kima, had been called kancha, an abusive street name for Nepali waiters and other hotel employees; few know it is considered derisive.
However, the incident had Kima posting on his blog that he would gladly educate the Mumbai police over coffee.
As it turned out, some brass invited Kima over, and apologised. Kima, on his part, accepted that the constable did not know that kancha was derogatorily used for Nepalis or that there were several states in India’s Northeast whose people tend to resemble Nepalis more than other Indian ethnicities.
Kima’s post cartwheeled across more social media orbits than merely those they directly impact — the citizens of Northeastern ethnicities in other parts of India and lovers of Mumbai, the city and all that is symbolises in popular imagination.
This traction was aided by the scary social upheaval of August 2012, when 30,000 panic-stricken people of Northeastern ethnicity had scrambled out of Bangalore and several other smaller cities on the back of rumours that they would be attacked in revenge for the attack on Muslims in Assam earlier, in July 2012.
The violence unleashed by Bodos, a largely Hindu tribe, had displaced nearly 40,000 Muslims in Assam and killed 80. But of course, between the events, falls the deadly metro-sized shadow.
Strafing & treaties
The late-release trigger to light the August 2012 Bangalore tinder was the vandalisation of a memorial for war heroes by several Muslims who were part of a peaceful protest in Azad Maidan in Mumbai.
The vandals, among the protestors who were purportedly protesting the Bodo violence on Muslims in Assam as well as Burmese killings of Muslim Rohingyas, also molested some women constables of the Mumbai police and snatched arms from cops.
This was on August 11. Three days after that, the Bangalore exodus forced the railways to add two special trains to accommodate spiralling bookings past the chicken neck that connects the Northeast region that is home to about 4% of Indian nationals in an area few in the mainland know about and have exposure to.
The panicky situation generated similar, though smaller waves of people, heading back to Guwahati from Chennai, Mysore and Coorg. Since things eased, we have had a fair amount of pious commentary about the alienation of migrants from India’s Northeastern states in mainland India, emphasising the old route of greater compassion and understanding.
Greener pastures
The migration from these fraught states of the Union into mainland India had a fairly perceptible character, English educated, ready for colleges, eager and hungry.
In the beginning of the ‘90s, the Northeastern migrants into the mainland ended up being the second distinctly directionally identified internal migrants of India after south Indians of the ‘60s and ‘70s.
The United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report of 2009 notes that there are four times as many internal migrants in the world than international migrants.
These, invariably, because they do not involve passports and visas, also tend to be overwhelmingly poor. Most studies on internal Indian migrations have also been preponderant in focusing on poor migrant workers and sharecroppers or farm labourers from rural country to urban areas.
The movement of rural migrants to cities has been the most constant internal migration in post-Independence India. However, there have been other migrations that have been less studied; the migration of the educated and the skilled.
By: Harish Nambiar
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