In June, North East India witnessed two related deaths: Raja Raghuvanshi from Indore was murdered in Meghalaya and Roshmita Hojai, a woman from Assam’s Dimasa tribe, drowned in Rishikesh in Uttarakhand. The North East link was common to both incidents but most media outlets in peninsular India had widely contrasting reactions.

Racist stereotypes emerged first. A national daily declared Meghalaya as a region of “crime-prone” hills with no mention of how many murders or other crimes had been committed in an area where tourism is central to the local economy.

One crime was all it took for mainstream and social media to condemn Meghalaya’s residents as “criminals”, without bothering to mention that the villagers around Sohra, where Raghuvanshi was murdered by the wife he had recently married and her accomplices, held a candlelight vigil to mourn the killing of a complete stranger.

On the other hand, newspapers devoted a two-inch column to Hojai, who was aspiring to be a civil servant, and added that two men accompanying her were detained for questioning. There was a complete absence of journalism on how the life of a young woman was nipped in the bud.

These contrasting reactions are not exceptions. Stereotypes abound in peninsular India about the people of the North East as “terrorists”, “secessionists” and immoral women.

Every few months, there are reports of women from the northeastern states were molested in Delhi. After one attack, a message was circulated in one of the universities that the women were assaulted because they do not dress like Indians.

In December 2021, when security forces gunned down six young men returning home from daily wage work in Mon in Nagaland, social media groups were filled with messages that the men were secessionists who deserved to die.

For over six decades, much of the North East has been under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, which gives extraordinary powers to the security forces. It grants the forces the impunity to gun down innocent people, as they did in Nagaland, if they claim to have done it in good faith on the line of duty.

I have heard a few who call themselves human rights activists and oppose the murder of civilians in the rest of India saying that the stringent law is needed in the North East because of secessionism. This assertion is rarely backed by an effort to find out how many “secessionists” there are or why there are conflicts in the region.

The “conflict zone” itself is an exaggerated stereotype. The more than 45 million people of the North East live with the disadvantage of distance with peninsular India, which they call the “mainland” because of its insular view of their region. This distance and relative isolation are physical as well as psychological and political.

For the British colonial regime, the North East was used as an isolated buffer zone between the rest of India and China and Burma. That isolation has continued after Independence. Decades after three wars were fought in the region in the 1960s – against China in 1962, Pakistan in 1965 and following the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 – the North East continues to be a buffer zone for national security.

Most North Easterners feel that peninsular India, which views itself as the “mainstream” centered on the Gangetic Valley Hindu dominant-caste male culture, does not understand them and that “mainstream” India stops at Kolkata.

To most “mainstream” Indians, the North East is a vague territory between Kolkata and Myanmar about which they know little.

During the last decade, this “distant land of conflicts” has become “the land of injustice” for the lakhs of immigrants excluded from the National Register of Citizens – like in Assam.

But for that the North East rarely enters mainstream Indian thinking. Even the national anthem exalts “Vindhya, Himachala, Yamuna, Ganga” and ignores the Brahmaputra, which is longer than the Ganga, is the fifth largest river in the world and confers an identity on the North East. But it is not an all-India sacred river. Efforts are being made of late to confer some sacredness on it but by connecting it to the Ganga, not in its own right.

Another verse of the national anthem includes “Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, Maratha, Dravida, Utkala, Vanga”, in other words, an Aryan-Dravidian India in which the people of the North East do not exist. Lakhs of people from the region are forced to go to “mainland” India because of the high unemployment and poor education infrastructure of the North East.

Because of their Mongoloid features, they are often referred to as “chinki”, a pejorative and racist term for the “enemy” Chinese. Women among them often face sexual harassment because of their looks and their being perceived as open to sexual advances.

These stereotypes have had disastrous consequences in times of crisis.

In 2020, after the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in China and later spread globally, there were reports of North East people in peninsular India being harassed, evicted from housing or denied entry because of their “Chinese” features.

A group of Naga students was refused entry to a mall in Mysuru, as were two Manipuri students in Hyderabad. A nurse in Bengaluru reported that a child ran away from her screaming “coronavirus”. Alana Golmei, who hails from Manipur and lives in Delhi, said that on three different occasions when she and a companion from Meghalaya entered the National Council of Educational Research and Training campus, staff taunted them with “coronavirus”.

The pandemic of racism endures even after the real one subsided.

For “mainstream” India, with its insular outlook and geographical distance from the North East, most conflicts in the region appear to “secessionist”.

Instead, it must recognise that the people of the region are searching for an identity of their own, within the Indian nation and not by joining the “mainstream” that equates national unity with uniformity.

They demand unity in diversity that respects their specificity. They want national security to mean the security of their people while belonging to a pluralist India that respects the ethnic specificity, culture, religion, language and worldview in which they find their identity. That is the pluralistic India mandated by the Constitution and it is time that the North East experiences it as well.

The two deaths are an opportunity for peninsular India to look at North East India afresh.

Walter Fernandes is Director, North Eastern Social Research Centre, Guwahati. His email ID is walter.nesrc@gmail.com.