Temba Bavuma highlighted the irony of facing racism in India, a brown-skinned nation that had stood firmly against apartheid. If there was ever a figurative slap in the face, this was it.
China patiently invested capital, skill and technology in coal gasification. Unlike it, we won’t move from words to action. As crude prices decline, we lose interest.
Such incidents are deeply disturbing after experiencing hospitality and friendly, helpful manner of people when I visited some NE states as a tourist.
To all my NE brothers and sisters – I am sorry!
A well-meaning piece. But a PhD scholar at JNU’s history department should know better than to recycle the same recommendations we have heard since the Bezbaruah Committee a decade ago.
Yes, stronger laws. Yes, better textbooks. But here is the question a historian should be asking first: why does this bias exist, and where did it actually come from?
Prejudice born out of unfamiliarity is not an Indian invention. After 9/11, Sikhs were beaten on American streets — mistaken for Taliban because of their turbans. This was not rural backwardness. These were educated, urban Americans who had simply never meaningfully encountered a Sikh person in their lives. The ignorance did the rest.
The same thing happened here, just more slowly. For decades, Congress governments left the Northeast physically cut off and culturally invisible to the rest of India. Two populations grew up as strangers inside the same country. Now that better roads and economic opportunity have brought them face to face, we are surprised there is friction. We should not be.
That is the real structural problem — not just gaps in the law or gaps in the syllabus, but the absence of any serious national effort to make Indians actually know each other. Not through a government poster campaign, but through sustained cultural exchange, shared media, and the ordinary experience of living alongside one another.
And here is something this piece avoids entirely: the bridge has two ends. Awareness cannot be a one-way obligation. That is not victim-blaming — it is just how human beings actually stop being strangers to each other.
Laws can punish. Textbooks can inform. But only familiarity — built deliberately, over time — truly dissolves prejudice. That is the answer staring this article in the face, which it somehow never sees.
Such incidents are deeply disturbing after experiencing hospitality and friendly, helpful manner of people when I visited some NE states as a tourist.
To all my NE brothers and sisters – I am sorry!
A well-meaning piece. But a PhD scholar at JNU’s history department should know better than to recycle the same recommendations we have heard since the Bezbaruah Committee a decade ago.
Yes, stronger laws. Yes, better textbooks. But here is the question a historian should be asking first: why does this bias exist, and where did it actually come from?
Prejudice born out of unfamiliarity is not an Indian invention. After 9/11, Sikhs were beaten on American streets — mistaken for Taliban because of their turbans. This was not rural backwardness. These were educated, urban Americans who had simply never meaningfully encountered a Sikh person in their lives. The ignorance did the rest.
The same thing happened here, just more slowly. For decades, Congress governments left the Northeast physically cut off and culturally invisible to the rest of India. Two populations grew up as strangers inside the same country. Now that better roads and economic opportunity have brought them face to face, we are surprised there is friction. We should not be.
That is the real structural problem — not just gaps in the law or gaps in the syllabus, but the absence of any serious national effort to make Indians actually know each other. Not through a government poster campaign, but through sustained cultural exchange, shared media, and the ordinary experience of living alongside one another.
And here is something this piece avoids entirely: the bridge has two ends. Awareness cannot be a one-way obligation. That is not victim-blaming — it is just how human beings actually stop being strangers to each other.
Laws can punish. Textbooks can inform. But only familiarity — built deliberately, over time — truly dissolves prejudice. That is the answer staring this article in the face, which it somehow never sees.