• Indian government holds talk with the Australian prime minister in the spate of this mounting racial mugging on Indian students.
• Thousands of Indian students in Australia take it out to the streets.
• Animosity grips the entire nation of India as well.
• The icon of tinsel town Amitabh Bachan snub’s an Aussie honour because of these string of attacks on Indians.
This incident brings to the public domain the concord of the Indian masses in the rise of any kind of prejudice meted out to their people. But what if that someone is from the northeast, would the approach of the people still be the same?
I wager the answer would sadly be in the negative. There are myriad northeast students studying in mainland India who are subjected to discrimination in one form or the other. So is our mongoloid origin to be held accountable for the turn of adversities? A good number of mainland Indians literally presumes that northeast people are still primitive and “JUNGLE” is their haven.
Well incalculable number of people actually had the impudence to ask me, I heard people in Nagaland eat snakes? Not only snakes I retort infuriatingly we eat everything that has life even humans…we are hardcore cannibals. Well, that reply certainly keeps them raking their brains. Some actually take the bait.
All these outlooks are formed on baseless hearsays from people who have never stepped foot on the northeast soil. The state of northeast hardly recovers any media coverage at all and the only time when the issue of northeast receives the spotlight is when there is a factional clash in Nagaland, Manipur or a bomb blast in Assam. That explains why most of the people are still ignorant about the real northeast.
Northeast girls are especially the vulnerable victims of discrimination with a series of molestation and rape cases which transpire almost on a daily basis. The annoying fact is that the police usually treat such matters with levity when that person concerned is from the northeast.
They refuse to file an FIR even after repeated appeal by the victim. As a result the perpetrators often get off the hook. Racial discrimination in any way is an offence which ought to be dealt with an iron hand. If bulk of the Indians can unite and fight against discrimination to one of their kind then why not for the cause of the minority as well. If northeast is a part of India then why are its people alienated from the rest of India? That’s the question that needs to be debated.