Once again a North Easterner has been murdered in New Delhi.
The death of Chongtham Vikram Singh will, of course, be felt most keenly by his loving family but the wider North Eastern community of Delhi and here in the region itself will also be experiencing the loss and the accompanying grief.
Although it is still too early to know whether race was a factor in Monday night’s brutal assault of Singh, which led to his death on Tuesday morning, people from the North East can be forgiven for assuming that it must have been.
This is simply because people from the region have experienced racism in the national capital and the rest of mainland India before and will no doubt do so again. The loss of Singh, from Manipur, is the latest in a long list of atrocities perpetrated against North Easterners.
This ranges from outright murder, such as of Arunachal Pradesh’s Nido Tania in 2014, to more common sexual harassment of North East women, housing discrimination, use of racial slurs and other forms of discrimination.
Singh was a beloved and respected musician and teacher who had been living in Delhi with his wife and son for 20 years. He was no outsider. Whether he was the victim of a racist murder may become clear in time. But there is no doubt that he was the victim of a brutality that our society has still been unable to come to grips with. How Singh’s request to a group of dhaba workers to keep the noise down could have spiralled into a situation where they chased him up a flight of stairs and brutally assaulted him before calmly leaving the block of flats (as seen on CCTV footage) is mind boggling.
Sadly, the North East has also witnessed periodic violence against mainlanders. Reasons for this include racism, to be sure, but also insecurity and fear of the outsider. Sometimes it is justified (perversely) as defence of the indigenous peoples.
India’s problem with violence, however, cannot be contained within artificial boxes. Because non-tribals kill non-tribals, tribals kill tribals, North Easterners kill North Easterners, people commit violence on those within their own communities, religions, castes, etc just as often, if not more so, than against ‘outsiders’.
What it points to is a sickness within our psyche. This is not an Indian problem alone but it exists throughout the world. Civilisation has made such great progress but deep down lay these demons of barbarity waiting to burst forth. Lessons may be learned from this senseless death and the guilty punished but the void left by Singh’s murder may never be healed.
