In the Name of Nido
India is being forced to reconsider how it views the neglected North-east. Some of the region’s brightest stars express themselves for India Today.
India is being forced to reconsider how it views the long-neglected North-east.
The Nido Tanias won’t go quietly any more. On January 29, the 19-year-old college student from Arunachal Pradesh was brutally assaulted in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar for sporting yellow streaked hair. Tania, son of MLA Nido Pavitra, was found dead the following morning from internal injuries at his sister’s home in Green Park Extension. As Delhi started coming to terms with what had happened, flash protests by North-east migrants began outside the Rajasthan Paneer Bhandar shop at Lajpat Nagar. Soon local Sikh residents joined the chorus, forcing political leaders from Narendra Modi to Rahul Gandhi to Arvind Kejriwal to acknowledge Nido’s tragic demise, and stirring the Delhi High Court into taking suo motu cognisance of media reports. The incident has emerged as a flash point for Northeast rights in a country where people from the Seven Sisters have been neglected and victimised for too long now.
Three months before Nido’s death, former Arunachal Pradesh MP Omak Apang was assaulted by a biker in the same Lajpat Nagar area. “He called me ‘ chinki’, pulled me by my collar, and snatched my car keys. All because I overtook him,” Apang says. The resignation to such violence was reflected in Mumbai on the same day. Rapper Borkung Hrangkhawl, 27, from Tripura, speaking on a panel of North-east writers at the Kala Ghoda Literature Festival, recounted how he had been the victim of a “routine” stabbing. “There was a small hole in my chest which I didn’t see because my shirt was also red, so my assailants bought me a Band-Aid,” he said. The audience erupted with fury. In 2012, a study by Babu Ramesh at the V.V. Giri National Labour Institute noted that migration from North-east had doubled in the last decade with 90,000-100,000 living in Delhi-NCR. This was followed by Bangalore, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Chandigarh, Pune and Hyderabad. With increased migration comes a greater need to be recognised as part of the mainland discourse. Social media is now helping people from the North-east come together in metros where they were once splintered. The anti-discrimination Facebook page created after Nido’s death has already received 52,000 likes.
Gouramangi Singh, 28, a footballer from Manipur and a member of the national team, believes change depends on this merging of paths between the North-eastern states and the mainland—now happening across fields as diverse as fashion, literature, art, sport, and media. Some of them have created special works of art for INDIA TODAY in the following pages.
Nido’s death is possibly a turning point for understanding the sociocultural identities of people from the North-east and the nuances that make them as Indian as anyone else can claim to be.
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