Anjel Chakma’s death and the double erasure of racism in India

The death of Anjel Chakma, a 24-year-old student from Tripura, has put the spotlight on racial violence and discrimination against residents of the North East in India.

On December 9, Chakma, who was in his final year of a master’s in business administration, and his brother were out buying groceries in Dehradun when a group of allegedly intoxicated men hurled racial slurs at them and attacked them. Chakma died of his injuries on December 27. “We are not Chinese…we are Indians,” Chakma said before he was assaulted, according to The Times of India.

Chakma’s death is the result of objecting to his own dehumanisation. At the same time, Chakma’s dehumanisation went unnoticed by the law enforcement. The police arrested three men and sent two juveniles to a detention home, but Dehradun Senior Superintendent of Police Ajay Singh said that in the preliminary investigation, there had been “no evidence of racial remarks”, according to The Hindu.

This double erasure shows how racial violence in India is normalised and deliberately erased. It also reflects a broader failure of the promises of equal citizenship. India and Indians must reckon with and address everyday racism for there to be any lasting lessons from Chakma’s death.

Invisible violence

In response to questions raised in Parliament over the past few years on racist discrimination and violence against Indians from the North East, the government has said that it has no data since such incidents are dealt with at the state government-level. This indicates that racist discrimination is not a matter of national concern or a civil rights issue.

Yet, racist harassment and assaults, like the one that claimed Chakma’s life, are frequent in India. Indians from the north east living in other parts of the country are often questioned about their nationality and denied accommodation based on their appearance.

For instance, several North East Indians in other parts of the country faced racist discrimination and were accused of being Chinese after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

Such racism is widespread and well documented in academic research, circulated in student WhatsApp groups and discussed by residents of the seven northeastern states. But only a fraction of these incidents make national headlines or result in criminal charges and shape public discourse about Indian identity and belonging.

For residents from the North East in other parts of India, it means living with the fear of explicit violence and of the spaces they inhabit. They navigate educational institutions and cities with vigilance, knowing that they can easily become targets of violence. This further leads to an internalised sense of exclusion and that they are viewed as foreigners in their own country.

Incidents of racism are also subsumed within broader narratives. For instance, a racist assault on a student from the North East is seen as a problem of campus safety in institutes of higher education. The sexual harassment of women, similarly, is reduced to an issue of gendered violence and not the racist perception of women from the North East as promiscuous and sexually available. This serves to sanitise racism rather than address the widespread reality of such discrimination.

Contrast this with the racist tone employed by mainstream Indian media organisations while covering the murder of a man from Madhya Pradesh on his honeymoon in Meghalaya. The police later arrested the man’s wife and her lover for the murder.

This reflects a hierarchy of victimhood in India where some incidents attract immediate, sustained outrage while others are regrettable but inevitable. Racial violence is treated like an unfortunate accident rather than a systemic failing.

Structural reckoning

Any meaningful response to Anjel Chakma’s death must involve a reckoning with how racial discrimination is produced and institutionalised in India. It means examining how the law enforcement is indifferent to racial violence while media coverage sanitises racism. There are also lessons in the testimonies of those who have experienced racial violence and harassment in India.

Anjel Chakma’s death is yet another manifestation of a pattern of racist prejudice that continues to be ignored. His death should not become another footnote but must force India to confront the racism of everyday life. This requires acknowledging that racial violence is a problem of systemic devaluation and addressing it requires moving from individual justice toward collective reckoning.

Prithiraj Borah, an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Law, at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad. His email address is prithiraj.borah@nalsar.ac.in.