When Anjel (Angel) Chakma, a 24 year old student from Tripura, was attacked in Dehradun, the story followed a pattern India has rehearsed for years: a Northeast student is brutalised, outrage erupts, leaders promise action, and the country moves on until the next body forces us to remember. Reports around the case describe the assault as racially motivated, with the student confronting abuse before the violence escalated; his family has also alleged initial police apathy, including reluctance to register an FIR. This is not just a “law and order” failure. It is a curriculum failure. It is a citizenship failure. And it is a government failure because the state has repeatedly refused to treat racism against people from the Northeast as a structural problem that requires structural correction.
Racism thrives where ignorance is normalised
Racism against Northeast Indians isn’t only about slurs, names, or the lazy “Chinese” stereotype. It is also the everyday suspicion: the policing, the landlord who refuses housing, the classroom that treats “Northeast” as a footnote, the media gaze that arrives only at tragedy. The Northeast becomes visible to “mainland India” as a crisis zone, a borderland, a conflict headline, or a tourist postcard rarely as a living, plural set of histories and cultures that belong at the centre of the national story.
That absence is political. It is maintained.
#AChapterForNE wasn’t a trend. It was a warning.
In 2021, students, academics, artists, and public figures drove a simple demand into the national conversation: include a dedicated, mandatory chapter on Northeast India in NCERT textbooks its histories, geographies, cultures, and political contexts so children don’t grow up thinking the region is “other.” The campaign (#AChapterForNE and #NortheastMatters) wasn’t asking for charity. It was asking for the basic architecture of belonging. And the reason that demand mattered then is exactly why it matters now: you cannot police your way out of prejudice that your education system keeps producing.
Why NCERT matters more than “awareness campaigns”
We love symbolic gestures because they are inexpensive. Candlelight marches. One day solidarity posts. A few condemnations. Maybe a special investigation team. Then silence.
But curricula are where societies decide what counts as “common knowledge.” When NCERT sidelines the Northeast, it teaches generations that the region is optional to understand and therefore optional to respect. That is how racism becomes “normal,” and violence becomes thinkable. This is why the government’s refusal (or chronic delay) to meaningfully integrate inclusive, robust Northeast content into school education is not a bureaucratic oversight. It is negligence with consequences.
We’ve been here before: Nido Tania, and the cycle of amnesia
After the killing of Nido Taniam in Delhi in 2014, I was part of the protest country wide, the country briefly admitted what Northeast Indians had long said: racism is real, and it is deadly. The protests forced a national conversation but the deeper reforms never matched the scale of the problem.
A decade later, another student dies. Different city, same pattern: the Northeast is made to repeatedly prove its Indianness in the streets sometimes with last words, sometimes with headlines.
“No racial slurs” is not the same as “no racism”
One of the most cynical moves in such cases is narrowing racism to a courtroom-friendly checklist: Were slurs used? Did someone explicitly say something racist? Officials sometimes lean on this framing to soften public outrage. But racism is not only verbal; it is also the social permission to target a body because it looks “outsider.”
If the state waits for perfect, explicit evidence of “racial intent” before treating such violence as racially charged, it will always arrive late after the damage is done.
What government accountability should look like (and hasn’t)
If the government is serious, it must stop treating Northeast citizens as a “migrant safety” issue and start treating racism as a national integrity issue.
1) NCERT: institutionalise inclusion, not tokenism.
Not a paragraph. Not a boxed insert. A mandatory, assessed chapter (or set of chapters across grades) that covers Northeast histories, communities, migrations, political movements, and contemporary life written with scholars from the region, not about the region from a distance.
2) Anti-racism protocols in campuses and hostels.
Fast-response grievance cells, language access, legal aid, and accountability for institutions that bury complaints.
3) Policing reforms that treat racial violence seriously from minute one.
Families alleging reluctance to file FIRs should terrify any democracy that claims equal citizenship.
4) Data and transparency.
Track hate incidents against Northeast Indians in a standardised way, publish regular reports, and audit responses. Because here’s the truth: every time we pretend this is “an isolated incident,” we are participating in the cover-up.
A chapter is not just text. It is protection.
People mock textbook representation as “symbolic politics.” But symbols are how societies distribute dignity. When a child grows up learning that the Northeast is integral to India not an exotic fringe then the adult they become is less likely to see a Northeast face as a target.And when the state repeatedly refuses to teach that belonging, it cannot act surprised when prejudice turns into violence.
The demand for #AChapterForNE was never merely academic. It was a civic intervention an attempt to stop the next killing. The tragedy in Uttarakhand shows why that demand remains unbearably, urgently relevant.
We protested then in 2014 in Punjab, Janter Manter.
