Discrimination

India has been a society based on discrimination for, our context, ever. Brahminical in nature, it has been segregated into “higher and lower” communities, and shut out the possibility of intermingling between these—Hindu “sacred” texts have legitimized this system. It allows a manual scavenger, or a teacher, no scope of aspiration except to live his/her “fate” as one and provide for their children thus.

Though the constitution of India seeks to go beyond this system, the people with decision making authority in India do not. It is this framework, prescribed in Hindu religious texts through a set of rules around purity, through which India looks at people from what is now its North East. At the core of it is casteism, which perhaps gives rise to racism.

If discrimination, and resulting violence in India, was about race, Hindus and Muslims in Gujarat or Uttar Pradesh would not massacre each other every decade—most hail from the same racial stock. Hindu “upper castes” would not violently punish and subjugate those from “lower castes.” Violence in India has been perpetrated centrally through caste.

So where do the people from the North East of India fit into this framework? Most middle to lower income families, not to mention the vast rural hinterland, in India have never come across a person of Mongoloid origin; and often they are reduced to “impure” food habits (the Brahmins claim to be the judge of pure from otherwise). There is an air of condescension when “well educated” middle aged hierarchomaniacs in India ask, “They eat everything, right? Beef? Snakes? Dogs? Have you eaten?”

By extension of this imagery, they are impure beings with principles and rules that do not fit into the “idea of India.” Anyone taking up these lifestyles is found to be outcast, which in the olden days would amount to social economic boycott. A word meant to uplift the status of discriminated minorities in India—scheduled—is used in tones of condescension and disgust.

Today, the people from the North East have left their regional realm and entered the hinterland. They are meritorious civil servants, entrepreneurs, scholars—a workforce. In clothing and attire, they outdo the retrograde urban Indian styles. Politically, they are progressive in many ways. This is unfathomable for people who consider themselves superior, by birth and blood, to people of the “scheduled” castes and tribes. And it is these people who people from the North East have to continuously interact with in the urban centres of India they have to work in.  

Such deep rooted prejudice is difficult, if not impossible, to tackle with the help of a race commission or anti-racism law. This is a problem of equality in India—intermingling of people from varied backgrounds does not come easy here. For this, either the political system, as it is practiced, has to be broken down, or separate polities created that let people beyond caste aspire for and forge their own futures. The oppressed have already stated their aspirations and actions for decades; it is now for the oppressors to recognize this and break status quo for the sake of justice.