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Why do we treat people from the north east so differently?

In the old days, journalists were prevented from referring to communities while reporting any acts of

violence. At some level, this made a certain amount of sense. If a man picked your pocket then it shouldn’t really matter whether he was a Sikh, a Jain, a

Muslim or whatever. All that mattered was that he was a pickpocket.

 

   But the real reason for the restraint had to do with the fear of provoking communal violence. If you reported that a Muslim had raped a Hindu woman then there was some danger of communally inspired reprisals. In today’s Mumbai, for instance, nothing is gained by reporting that Maharashtrians were robbed by UP-ites; and something might well be lost.

 

   Often, this restraint went too far. Readers began to giggle when every Hindu-Muslim riot was described as ‘a clash between two communities.’ And often, you didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what had really happened. For instance, if a report read “some miscreants threw raw pork into a place of worship,” it was quite obvious that a mosque had been desecrated.

 

   Nevertheless, I still believe that we should not worry about people’s religion or ethnic origin unless it is vital to the story. For instance, nobody in the US would report something like “four black men were today arrested for mugging an old white woman.” This would be needlessly inflammatory.

 

   I was reminded of the need for restraint when I saw the way the media – TV mainly, but print also – covered the case of the allegedly demented IIT graduate who killed a girl.

 

   If the police are to be believed – and the media certainly believed the police – then the murderer had not only confessed but had been revealed to be a psychopath who had stalked the girl because of his own inadequacies.

 

   Nowhere in the reporting did I find any evidence that the psycho in question had been fascinated by people from the north east or had targeted his victim because of her ethnic origin: she was a Naga from Manipur.

 

   And yet, judging by the reportage, the murder was one more instance of how girls from the north east were treated badly in Delhi. Channel after channel had the same foolish discussion about the problems faced by people from the north east and about how they faced discrimination in the Capital.

 

 "How else do you explain why we treat the murder of a Naga differently from the murder of a Muslim or a Sikh?"

   I do not dispute that girls from the north east find it difficult to gain acceptance in the Indian mainstream. Nor do I dispute that there is a certain amount of racism implicit in the way that they are treated.

 

   My point is this: this murder had nothing to do with racism or with the prejudice against north easterners.

 

   So why treat the victim’s ethnicity as being the primary component of the story? Why stage all these discussions on north easterners in Delhi when this story had nothing to do with discrimination?

 

   To understand how bizarre this kind of news treatment is, consider what would have happened if the victim had been a Muslim girl. Would we have run stories talking about the discrimination faced by Muslims? Would we have treated the murder as one more example of the mistreatment of Muslims by Hindus?

 

   Of course not.

 

   So why do we treat people from the north east so differently?

 

   Part of it is laziness. Journos know that this is an easy discussion to organize so they go ahead and stage one regardless of the relevance to the story.

 

   But part of it is also racism.

 

   How else do you explain why we treat the murder of a Naga differently from the murder of a Muslim or a Sikh?
 

CommentsComments

  • Punit 13 Jan 2012

    I dont think its the fault of racist attitude of indians.i never find any news related to south india,neast india in these funny hindi news channels or even english ones they only talk about delhi or mumbai etc or other good for trp things.it looks like they are some other country.its the fault of govt. Giving near zero attention to northeast.

  • keshav 25 Sep 2010

    The incident might have nothing to do about racism, but our racist attitudes are an issue and we do well to hold a mirror to our attitudes sooner rather than later. It's not an ideal world, and opportunities must be taken where they present themselves. The sad thing is that it takes such a tragedy, for these debates to happen. And indians in the US wonder why are the whites so racist..

  • Lalitha R 20 Jun 2010

    Just making it to IIT is not a qualification for being sane & reasonable. There are lots of Madcaps in these colleges. Besides, Indians are the biggest racists in the world. We are ready to point a finger at other countries even at an imagined slight. The way we treat the north eastern folks is shameful.

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