Racism against Northeast Indians refers to the sustained pattern of racial prejudice, discrimination, physical violence, sexual harassment, and systematic exclusion directed at people from the eight states of Northeast India, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura, when they migrate to live, work, or study in other parts of India, commonly referred to as the "mainland." The phenomenon is extensively documented in academic literature, government reports, legal proceedings, and journalistic accounts spanning several decades. Despite constitutional guarantees of equality and freedom of movement under Articles 14, 15, and 19, and despite periodic political attention following high-profile incidents of violence, the problem has persisted into the 2020s with limited structural reform. Scholars across sociology, urban studies, gender studies, and social anthropology have characterised the discrimination as a form of internal racism rooted in phenotypic difference, colonial-era categorisation of ethnic groups, geopolitical anxieties stemming from India's borderland politics, and the cultural marginalisation of the region within India's national imaginary.
The most significant government response came in 2014 with the formation of the Bezbaruah Committee, established by the Ministry of Home Affairs following the killing of Nido Tania, a student from Arunachal Pradesh who died after shopkeepers in a Lajpat Nagar market beat him in response to taunts about his ethnic appearance. The committee's recommendations, including the enactment of a specific anti-discrimination law and the establishment of fast-track courts for racially motivated crimes, have largely not been implemented. As of 2026, India remains without specific anti-racism legislation comparable to frameworks adopted in the United Kingdom, South Africa, or Australia.
Northeast India covers approximately 262,000 square kilometres and is home to hundreds of distinct ethnic communities, languages, and indigenous traditions. The region borders China, Myanmar, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Nepal, and is connected to the rest of India by only a narrow land corridor known as the Siliguri Corridor, commonly called the "Chicken's Neck," near Siliguri, which has historically limited economic and social integration with the mainland. The cultural and phenotypic character of the region is markedly distinct from that of the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian populations that make up the majority of mainland India. The majority of indigenous peoples of the Northeast belong to what physical anthropologists have classified as the Mongoloid racial type, sharing traits including epicanthic eye folds, flatter nasal bridges, and complexions distinct from typical South Asian features. This visible difference is widely documented as the primary trigger for the racial othering that Northeast migrants encounter in cities such as Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, and Kolkata.
Large-scale migration from the Northeast to mainland Indian cities accelerated from the 1990s onwards, driven by limited economic opportunities at home, the presence of armed conflict and militarism in several states, and the pull of better-connected universities and service sector employment. According to the Bezbaruah Committee report of 2014, more than two lakh (200,000) people from Northeast India had migrated to Delhi alone between 2005 and 2013. India's economic liberalisation created a notable concentration of Northeast migrants in the retail, hospitality, telecommunications, and wellness sectors, where their bilingualism, familiarity with English, and Western-influenced cultural practices made them commercially desirable employees. Duncan McDuie-Ra, Professor of Development Studies at the University of New South Wales documented this dynamic in his ethnographic study Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail (2012), observing that the very cultural characteristics that made Northeast migrants employable in neoliberal consumer spaces also marked them as outsiders in everyday social life.
The roots of the racial othering of Northeast Indians run back to British colonial policy. Colonial administrators deliberately separated the hill territories of the Northeast from the plains of British India through a series of exclusionary laws and spatial demarcations, including the Scheduled Districts Act of 1874 and later the Inner Line Permit system. These policies treated the indigenous hill peoples as categorically different from the rest of the Indian population, reinforcing boundaries between what colonial ethnography termed "tribal" and "non-tribal" India. Colonial racial science produced a body of literature classifying the peoples of the region as belonging to a distinct Mongoloid stock, a categorisation that was inherited by post-independence Indian society without critical re-examination.
Scholars including Thongkholal Haokip have noted that the category of "northeastern" functions in contemporary India as a colonial residue: a catch-all marker of racial difference that flattens the enormous internal diversity of the region into a single, foreign-seeming type. The India-China War of 1962 added a specifically geopolitical dimension to the racial suspicion directed at Northeast Indians. Anthropologist Dolly Kikon has argued that this period normalised what she calls a "racialized hierarchy of citizenship," in which people whose faces did not match the imagined "Indian face" were rendered suspect as potential enemy sympathisers or foreigners.
Academic researchers have used the framework of "racial hypervisibility" to describe the experience of Northeast Indians in mainland cities. Their physical distinctiveness means they are constantly identified, stared at, and targeted in public spaces in ways that other Indian migrants from states such as Bihar or Tamil Nadu are not. McDuie-Ra describes this as a process of othering driven by phenotypic difference: Northeast migrants' epicanthic eye folds and other East Asian features make them instantly identifiable to mainland Indians as different, and that difference is immediately coded as foreign.
Jelle J.P. Wouters and Tanka B. Subba (2013) introduced the concept of the "Indian Face" as a discursive and somatic image representing the Indian nation, arguing that Mongoloid phenotypes have not found a place in the common imaginary of what a co-citizen looks like, even though the "Indian Face" is itself a highly diversified concept. They found that people from the Northeast are often misrecognised by wider Indian society as foreigners from China, Nepal, Thailand, or Japan, and that this withholding of "Indianness" works to discriminate against and marginalise them in everyday life. This dynamic was on direct display when Anjel Chakma, before being stabbed by his attackers in Dehradun in December 2025, reportedly told them: "We are not Chinese. We are Indians. What certificate should we show to prove that?"
The most pervasive and daily form of discrimination Northeast Indians face is verbal abuse. The most commonly deployed slur is "chinky" or "chinki," a term derived from the English word "chink" that targets people of East Asian appearance. In 2011 the Indian government declared "chinky" a racist term attracting prosecution under the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989. The Bezbaruah Committee in 2014 specifically noted the routine use of this term and recommended further criminalisation, but as of 2026 no comprehensive anti-racism law incorporating this recommendation has been enacted.
Other common terms of abuse include "momo" (after the Tibetan-origin dumpling associated with Northeast and Nepali cuisine), "Nepali" used as a reductive catch-all, and "corona" from 2020 onwards. When Anjel Chakma was attacked in Dehradun in December 2025, his attackers used precisely this cluster of slurs like shouting "Nepali," "Chinese," "Chinki," and "momos" before the assault turned violent. Research published in the International Social Science Journal in 2022 documented that during the COVID-19 pandemic the sexual stereotype directed at Northeast women explicitly merged with the disease stereotype, demonstrating how racial hostility draws on whatever cultural anxieties are available at a given moment rather than reflecting any stable perception of the targeted group.
Beyond slurs related to ethnicity and appearance, Northeast migrants are targeted for their food practices, language, names, and dress. Eating dog meat or pork, practices common in parts of the Northeast, are used to justify social exclusion. Speaking languages other than Hindi is treated as evidence of foreignness rather than as the natural consequence of India's vast multilingualism.
McDuie-Ra, in his chapter titled "Backward, Head-Hunter, Sexy, Chinky," enumerates the racial stereotypes Northeast migrants encounter across class contexts and geographical settings within Delhi, finding that verbal abuse is not confined to uneducated or low-income perpetrators but is documented in workplaces, educational institutions, and public transport alike.
Incidents of physical violence against Northeast Indians have been documented since at least the 1990s, but it was the killing of Nido Tania in January 2014 that brought national attention to the issue. Tania, a 20-year-old student from Arunachal Pradesh and the son of a state legislator, was beaten to death in the Lajpat Nagar market area of Delhi after shopkeepers mocked his dyed-blonde hair and his ethnic appearance; he died of severe lung and brain injuries. His death catalysed the formation of the Bezbaruah Committee and prompted the largest public debate about racism in India in the post-independence period.
His murder was not an isolated incident. Researchers have catalogued comparable cases, including the death of Richard Loitam in Bangalore, a 19-year-old architecture student from Manipur who was found dead in his hostel room in April 2012 following an altercation with fellow students; the murder of Ramchanphy Hongray, a 19-year-old woman from Manipur who was sexually assaulted, strangled, and burned at her rented apartment in south Delhi in October 2009; and the suicide of Dana Sangma, an MBA student from Meghalaya, at Amity University in Noida in 2012, following allegations of discriminatory treatment by a university invigilator. McDuie-Ra analyses the gendered disparity in coverage these cases received in his book Debating Race in Contemporary India, showing how victim gender determines the degree of national public response, with women's deaths treated as less socially significant and therefore less worthy of sustained media attention.
In December 2025, Anjel Chakma, a 24-year-old final-year MBA student from Tripura's Unakoti district, was stabbed by a group of men in the Selaqui area of Dehradun on 9 December after his attackers hurled racial slurs at him and his brother Michael; he died of his injuries on 26 December 2025 after seventeen days in hospital. Five suspects were arrested and murder charges were added after his death; a public interest litigation was subsequently filed before the Supreme Court of India seeking guidelines to address racial discrimination against Northeast Indians. The Tripura Legislative Assembly paid formal tribute to Chakma on 23 March 2026.
In February 2026, three women from Arunachal Pradesh residing in Malviya Nagar, south Delhi, were subjected to racial abuse by a neighbouring couple during a dispute over debris from maintenance work; the altercation, captured on video, included slurs telling the women to "go and sell momos" and describing "northeast people as shit." The accused couple were arrested by Delhi Police on 25 February 2026 under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu contacted the Delhi Police Commissioner to demand action and later confirmed the arrests.
The cyclical pattern of high-profile killing, public outrage, promises of reform, and subsequent inaction has itself become a recognised feature of academic and activist discourse around the issue.
A 2022 study on othering experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic in Delhi found, drawing on earlier data, that Delhi is the most unsafe city for Northeast Indians, with a Northeast person targeted on average every alternate day.
Finding accommodation is one of the most immediately fraught experiences for Northeast migrants arriving in mainland cities. Landlords routinely refuse housing based on assumptions about the cultural practices and moral character of Northeast tenants, with common justifications including concerns about the consumption of alcohol, hosting members of the opposite sex, cooking food with strong smells, or keeping social hours that violate the norms of the landlord's community. The Bezbaruah Committee report specifically mentioned that Northeast women face harassment by landlords and property dealers, a finding corroborated by a National Commission for Women-commissioned survey by the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research, which found that 23 percent of Northeast women surveyed had been harassed by landlords or property dealers.
These refusals push Northeast migrants into a small number of urban neighbourhoods, notably Mukherjee Nagar in Delhi, where a critical mass of the community has already established a presence and landlords have learned that the economic benefits of renting to Northeast tenants outweigh cultural discomfort. While this clustering provides social support and a degree of insulation from hostility, it also reproduces the spatial segregation that marks marginalised communities in cities worldwide.
Northeast migrants are heavily concentrated in low-wage service sector work, including malls, call centres, restaurants, salons, and spas. McDuie-Ra's ethnographic research demonstrates that their cultural capital, including English proficiency, cosmopolitan taste, and familiarity with Western consumer culture, is extracted and monetised in neoliberal service spaces, while outside those spaces they remain racialised outsiders: employed precisely because their cultural difference is commercially useful, and simultaneously marginalised because that same difference marks them as racially inferior in the broader social order.
The volume edited by Venkat Pulla, Rituparna Bhattacharyya, and Sanjai Bhatt (2020) explores how Northeast migrants are stereotyped as "backwards, anti-national, anti-assimilationist, and immoral" and are consequently relegated to low-status positions even when their qualifications would justify better employment. Several studies note a pattern of lower wages for Northeast workers performing the same tasks as their mainland Indian counterparts, and many face difficulty accessing part-time jobs despite universities making internships mandatory. A commentary published in Morung Express following the death of Anjel Chakma described this as a form of "racial capitalism" in which the otherness of Northeasterners is commodified in service industries while simultaneously making them targets for harassment outside those commercial spaces.
One of the most extensively documented dimensions of racism against Northeast Indians is its specifically gendered expression toward women. Northeast Indian women face a form of discrimination that operates at the intersection of race and gender, producing a set of stereotypes and behaviours qualitatively distinct from those directed at Northeast Indian men. The North East Support Centre and Helpline, established in New Delhi in 2007 as a wing of the All India Christian Council, was specifically founded to address this combination of racial and gender violence, recognising that existing institutional frameworks were inadequate to address it.
The most pervasive and damaging stereotype directed at Northeast Indian women in mainland cities is the assumption that they are sexually available, morally loose, or promiscuous. This stereotype is rooted in several overlapping factors: the greater social autonomy that women from many Northeast communities have historically exercised, their adoption of Western fashion and social norms, and a racialising male gaze that globally tends to code women of East and Southeast Asian appearance as exotic and sexually accessible.
A survey by the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research, commissioned by the National Commission for Women, found that 29 percent of Northeast women in four metropolitan cities reported harassment and molestation, and 42 percent reported verbal abuse; sixty percent of Northeast women surveyed in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Bangalore had faced some form of harassment or discrimination.
The academic literature on this fetishisation traces it to three tropes identified by Dolly Kikon in her analysis of Indian majoritarian politics: the insurgent (coding Northeast people as politically suspect), the foreigner (coding them as non-Indian), and the body of the "Chinky woman," which is exoticised, sexualised, and understood as available in quotidian encounters with mainland Indian men. Women from the region are thus subject not just to racial slurs but to a form of racial desire that is itself dehumanising: they are seen as sexually accessible because they are seen as culturally other, and that otherness is simultaneously the source of their perceived desirability and their actual vulnerability.
Research published in the International Social Science Journal in 2022 documented that during the COVID-19 pandemic the sexual stereotype explicitly merged with the disease stereotype, producing a formulation in which Northeast women were described simultaneously as promiscuous and as biological threats. The continuity of the language of contamination and pollution across both framings reveals the structural logic at work: Northeast women's bodies are imagined as fundamentally impure in mainland social discourse, whether morally or microbiologically, and their presence in mainland space is constructed as transgressive.
Northeast women report routine sexual harassment in public spaces, on buses and metro trains, in markets, and on streets near their neighbourhoods. Survey participants quoted in journalism and academic research recall being harassed by men on Delhi Transport Corporation buses while commuting, being propositioned as sex workers, and being physically approached or followed on the street. Women who have sought police assistance have in several documented cases been actively discouraged from filing formal complaints, creating a double bind in which harassment is common and institutional recourse is unreliable.
Haokip (2021) documents the stereotype through which Northeast women are described by male respondents as "easy women." The framing of women as prostitutes or as sexually available means that harassment is frequently rationalised by perpetrators and sometimes by authorities as a misunderstanding rather than as violence. In the Malviya Nagar incident of February 2026, the accused woman directed the slur "dhandhewali" (meaning a woman engaged in prostitution) at the three Arunachali tenants, a direct example of the sexualised nature of racial abuse directed at Northeast women.
Researchers Ajailiu Niumai and M.N. Rajesh, writing in the Journal of Social and Economic Development (2025), apply an intersectionality framework to the experiences of Northeast Indians in Hyderabad, documenting how the intersection of race, gender, and caste compounds the discrimination Northeast women face. Caste-based assumptions from mainland Indian society interact with racial stereotypes to produce a specific kind of social inferiority: Northeast women occupy a position simultaneously racialised as foreign and ranked lower than that of mainland women. They are excluded from certain social networks, marriage markets, and communities on racial grounds, while simultaneously being subject to sexual harassment from men who would not consider them eligible partners, a dynamic of sexualisation combined with social exclusion that is one of the defining features of the gendered racism they experience.
The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically worsened the situation for Northeast Indians in mainland cities. Because Northeast Indians share phenotypic features with East Asian populations, they were targeted as presumed carriers of the virus from the earliest weeks of the pandemic. Research published in Asian Ethnicity by Haokip (2021) documents a systematic upsurge in racist incidents directed at Northeast Indians beginning in February 2020, arguing that the pandemic reinforced rather than created racism against the group, which the country had been grappling with for at least a decade.
Documented incidents included a woman from Manipur being spat on in a Delhi street while being called "corona," a student being shouted at in a market with the words "Get lost, it is because of you people that coronavirus has come," and Northeast students being denied entry to grocery stores. A 2022 study based on qualitative interviews with nineteen Northeast residents of Delhi, conducted during the first wave of the pandemic, found that the outbreak had exacerbated othering and produced new forms of stigmatisation, insecurity, and mental and emotional strain.
The Rights and Risks Analysis Group (RRAG), a New Delhi-based civil rights organisation, published Coronavirus Pandemic: India's Mongoloid Looking People Face Upsurge of Racism (2020), cataloguing 22 hate crimes and incidents of racial prejudice between 7 February and 25 March 2020 alone. The report concluded that the pandemic had removed the thin layer of social restraint that sometimes governs the expression of racial hostility in everyday life, but that the underlying structural racism predated the pandemic by decades.
The most significant formal institutional response to racism against Northeast Indians in the post-independence period was the M.P. Bezbaruah Committee, established in February 2014 by the Ministry of Home Affairs following the killing of Nido Tania. The committee, chaired by retired IAS officer M.P. Bezbaruah, was tasked with examining discrimination and safety concerns facing Northeast people living outside their home region and recommending corrective measures; it submitted its report to the Ministry of Home Affairs on 11 July 2014. The committee estimated that 86 percent of the over 200,000 Northeast migrants in Delhi had experienced discrimination.
Its key recommendations included the enactment of a specific anti-discrimination law or an amendment to the Indian Penal Code to address racial discrimination explicitly; making racially motivated offences cognisable and non-bailable; establishing a Special Police Unit for North Eastern Region (SPUNER); setting up fast-track courts for racially motivated crimes; and integrating Northeast history, culture, and society into school and university curricula nationwide.
Most of these recommendations have not been implemented. Following the death of Anjel Chakma, the Tipra Motha Party demanded the enactment of a dedicated anti-racial violence law, with party spokespersons stating that the lack of such legislation had allowed discrimination and racially motivated violence to persist unchecked. The same recommendations that the Bezbaruah Committee had made in 2014 were again cited by members of Parliament, civil society organisations, and political leaders in early 2026 following the Malviya Nagar incident.
India's Constitution provides significant protections on paper. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law; Article 15 prohibits discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth; Articles 19(1)(d) and (e) guarantee freedom of movement and residence throughout India. In 2014, the Supreme Court of India, in Court on its Own Motion v. Union of India, directed state and central governments to curtail discriminatory practices against Northeast people, noting that such incidents threatened national integrity and violated constitutional rights.
Despite these provisions, India lacks a specific anti-racism law. Unlike the United Kingdom (Race Relations Act), South Africa (Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act), or Australia (Racial Discrimination Act 1975), India has no equivalent legislative framework directly addressing racial discrimination and creating enforceable civil remedies. Critics including McDuie-Ra have argued that criminalising slurs, while symbolically important, does not address the structural conditions that produce racial hierarchy.
In 2017, the Delhi Police created a special helpline for people from Northeast India residing in the National Capital Region, managed through SPUNER, itself a Bezbaruah Committee recommendation and an acknowledgement that standard policing was failing Northeast migrants. Researchers and community members have noted that awareness of the helpline remains low, and that trust in police among Northeast migrants, particularly women who have been discouraged from filing complaints after harassment, remains limited.
Northeast Indians in mainland cities have developed extensive social solidarity networks as a response to discrimination. The creation of neighbourhood clusters, community organisations, church groups, and shared social spaces constitutes what McDuie-Ra calls a "northeast map of Delhi," an alternative geography allowing migrants to survive the city by maintaining a sense of community and belonging within it.
Following the murder of Nido Tania in February 2014, the largest protests by Northeast Indians on mainland Indian soil were held at Jantar Mantar in Delhi. After the death of Anjel Chakma in December 2025, students from the Northeast staged a demonstration at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi demanding justice and an anti-racial violence law. Digital activism, including the use of social media to document and publicise incidents of discrimination in real time, has grown substantially. Ninong Ering, a former Member of Parliament from Arunachal Pradesh, introduced a Private Member Bill, "The Compulsory Teaching of North-East Culture in Educational Institutions," seeking to mandate the inclusion of Northeast history, culture, and peoples in national school curricula as a legislative response to discrimination rooted in ignorance. The film Axone (2019), directed by Nicholas Kharkongor, brought the daily realities of discrimination to wider national audiences through fiction, depicting housing refusals, culinary racism, and the social invisibility of Northeast communities in Delhi.
The academic literature on racism against Northeast Indians is relatively recent but growing rapidly across multiple disciplines.
The ideological position, common in mainstream Indian discourse, that because caste rather than race is India's primary mode of social hierarchy, racial discrimination as such does not exist or is not a serious problem, what Pulla, Bhattacharyya, and Bhatt call the "myth of a raceless India", has been one of the most significant structural obstacles to legal reform and social change.
The mainstream Indian media has historically underrepresented the Northeast region and its peoples. When the Northeast appears in national media it is disproportionately in the context of insurgency, militancy, and political conflict, a framing that reinforces the association of the region with instability while the ordinary lives, cultural achievements, and civic contributions of Northeast people remain largely absent from the national media landscape. A journalist from Assam who recounted being asked "which country" he was from by a person in Uttar Pradesh noted that when he explained he was Indian and from Assam, his interlocutor was genuinely uncertain whether Assam was a foreign land, and "the map of India did not end where his familiarity did."
Social media has partially disrupted this dynamic, with Northeast artists, musicians, writers, athletes, and activists using digital platforms to reach national audiences and complicate stereotypes. Indian television, cinema, and advertising have gradually increased representation of Northeast people, though critics note that such representation often continues to exoticise or tokenise rather than normalise, and that Northeast women in particular are frequently portrayed in ways that reproduce rather than challenge the stereotypes of sexual availability and cultural transgression documented in the academic literature.
A recurring theme in accounts of racism against Northeast Indians is the reluctance of mainland Indians to recognise the phenomenon as racism at all. The word "racism" carries political weight in Indian discourse; it is primarily associated with colonial history and understood as something that white Europeans did to Indians, and applying the same term to intra-Indian relations is resisted by many. Incidents are frequently reframed as misunderstandings, cultural friction, or random violence rather than as racially motivated harm.
This denial takes institutional form as well. Following the death of Anjel Chakma in December 2025, Tipra Motha Party founder Pradyot Bikram Manikya Deb Barma alleged that the Uttarakhand authorities had initially attempted to portray the incident as not racially motivated, despite the family's account of the racial slurs that preceded the assault. Police frequently decline to register cases of racial harassment as hate crimes, and Northeast victims have in several documented cases been discouraged from pursuing formal complaints.
Pradyot Bikram Manikya Debbarma, founder of the Tipra Motha Party, addressed this pattern of denial in a media interview, stating: "Everybody knows these things are happening. It is because of ignorance and the belief that certain communities are superior to others. Racism exists in India. We are the world's largest producer of Fair and Lovely. Whether we admit it or not, racism exists."