Belonging Without Shelter: What Karbi Anglong And Anjel Chakma’s Death Reveal About The Northeast

In Karbi Anglong, Assam, a video has recently circulated showing men shouting at indigenous Karbi youths, telling them to “go back to China.” The words were delivered without hesitation—not in a burst of anger or panic, but with an ease that revealed something more unsettling than rage. The confidence suggested that questioning an indigenous community’s right to its own land no longer required justification, explanation, or even apology.

Not long after, in Dehradun, Anjel Chakma, a student from Tripura, was attacked following racial abuse and later died of his injuries. As the assault unfolded, he reportedly tried to assert something that shouldn’t have needed asserting in the first place: that he was Indian. The claim did not protect him; it did not interrupt the violence and it changed nothing. A member of the North East Students’ Society of Delhi University (NESSDU) collective responding to the attack observed, “He kept saying he was Indian because that is what people from the Northeast are forced to say when things turn violent.”

These two moments are being discussed as separate failures—one framed as a localised flare-up of hostility, the other as racial violence unfolding far from the region. But when read together, they point to something more durable and more troubling. In the Northeast, belonging has thinned precisely where it should be most secure. Outside the region, citizenship collapses with alarming speed. The forms of violence differ, but the condition beneath them is shared. This is not a failing that occurs episodically; rather, it develops gradually over time.

When indigeneity becomes contestable

Calling Karbis “Chinese” in Karbi Anglong is not a casual slur or a moment of verbal excess; it performs a precise political act by stripping indigeneity of its historical grounding and reducing it to appearance, suggesting that ancestral presence can be overridden by demographic confidence and that recognition endures only until it is challenged by louder, more numerous, or more assertive claims.

That such a declaration could be made openly in a Sixth Schedule area is not incidental, because the Schedule was conceived precisely to remove indigeneity from everyday contestation, insulating land, governance and cultural authority from the logic of arrival, numbers, or force of speech. Its purpose was never symbolic reassurance or ceremonial acknowledgement; it was meant to take belonging out of the argument altogether, placing it beyond negotiation and provocation.

What Karbi Anglong reveals, however, is how far that insulation has thinned in practice. Autonomous councils continue to exist, boundaries remain notified and protections are regularly cited in official language. Yet, none of these translated into immediate authority on the ground when the insult was made. The provocation was possible because it was plausible, carrying with it the expectation that no decisive response would follow and that the challenge could be issued without consequence. As one Karbi youth involved in the protests later put it, “Being told to ‘go back’ in our own land was not just insulting; it made us realise how fragile our protection has become.”

The State’s response has been instructive. Authorities suspended mobile internet and data services in Karbi Anglong as a precaution during the unrest and, after a review of the law-and-order situation, restored connectivity five days later—an exercise in administrative containment rather than a political settlement that clarified indigenous authority or addressed the conditions that made such provocation possible in the first place.

This pattern continued in the official remedy that followed. The Chief Minister chaired tripartite talks and announced that the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council would cancel trade licences of commercial establishments operating on disputed VGR/PGR land and initiate eviction and fencing drives—measures aimed at administrative remediation after the fact, rather than an institutional articulation of how indigenous authority is to be defended before it is publicly challenged.

This is the kind of quiet erosion that precedes open conflict. When legal protections lose their everyday force and retreat into paperwork and procedure, belonging re-enters the realm of negotiation, where it can be tested, probed, and pushed until resistance weakens and the terms of recognition begin to shift.

Citizenship that collapses on contact

If Karbi Anglong exposes the fragility of indigeneity at home, Anjel Chakma’s death exposes how little Northeastern citizenship holds once it leaves the region. For many in the Northeast, this recognition is not new. Their citizenship has long travelled poorly, burdened by suspicion well before documents are examined or explanations are offered. Faces are read as foreign before names are spoken, accents invite casual mockery, and in hostels, streets, and workplaces, Northeastern bodies are treated less as ordinary presences than as anomalies that require explanation.

The violence that killed Chakma did not emerge from nowhere. It followed a familiar progression in which racial taunts pass without sanction, social indifference signals permission and the absence of consequence hardens into expectation. What remains hardest to absorb is the nature of his final assertion. He did not appeal to dignity or demand protection; he asserted nationality itself. This was not a breakdown of social harmony, nor a misunderstanding between individuals. It was a failure of enforcement. A state that cannot guarantee bodily safety to its citizens because of how they look has allowed citizenship to become conditional in practice, regardless of what constitutional text may promise.

In Dehradun, too, the institutional response followed a familiar script. Uttarakhand’s Chief Minister phoned the victim’s family, describing the incident as “regrettable” and promising strict punishment, while the police said several accused had been arrested and investigations were underway—gestures of reassurance that matter, but which do not by themselves secure the everyday safety of Northeastern citizens once public attention moves on.

Two vulnerabilities, one design

Karbi Anglong and Dehradun are separated by geography, but they are shaped by the same structural ambiguity that has long defined the Northeast’s relationship with the Indian state. Within the region, the state has never clearly settled how indigenous authority is to be defended once demographic movement and economic pressure intensify. Outside it, the state has never insisted with comparable force that Northeastern citizens are non-negotiably Indian, entitled to safety and dignity without explanation or proof.

The result is a condition of double exposure. At home, indigenous communities are reminded—sometimes obliquely, sometimes without disguise—that their claims to land and authority can be tested, negotiated or overridden. Beyond the region, individuals encounter a different but related vulnerability, learning that their belonging is provisional, subject to scrutiny, withdrawal or violence, depending on where they stand and who is watching.

Civil society responses have been more direct. Condemning the slogans raised in Karbi Anglong, the All Assam Students’ Union said that “Such behaviour towards the indigenous people in Assam’s land is unbearable” and demanded strict action—language that transforms individual insult into a public indictment of how easily belonging can be questioned when protections thin.

This ambiguity is not accidental. For decades, governance in the Northeast has relied on postponement rather than settlement, allowing migration into the region to proceed without serious political mediation, while treating indigenous anxieties as inconveniences and migrant insecurities as problems best ignored until they erupt. When conflict finally surfaces, the State intervenes as an administrator managing disorder rather than as an author willing to acknowledge the conditions it helped produce. Silence takes the place of policy and distance substitutes for responsibility.

One consequence of this arrangement is the unequal distribution of restraint. Indigenous communities are expected to absorb change quietly—urged to remain patient, inclusive and adaptable, even as their authority is tested and their protections thin. Expressions of fear or anger are quickly reframed as instability, while moments of targeting are met with advice to remain calm and avoid escalation. Outside the region, individuals are asked to perform a different, more intimate labour: explaining themselves in social spaces where no one else is required to, repeatedly proving nationality, managing suspicion without appearing defensive, enduring slurs without provoking confrontation and carrying the burden of reassurance in environments that offer none in return.

This asymmetry is produced by a political order that has normalised the idea that some citizens must work harder, more carefully, and more quietly to belong, while others are permitted to take belonging for granted.

A Sixth Schedule that reassures but does not protect

The Sixth Schedule remains central to this story not because it failed in principle, but because it has been hollowed out in practice. Its institutions continue to function, yet their authority has narrowed over time, with decisions frequently overridden and autonomy reduced to consultation. What was meant to operate as a shield has gradually become a form of reassurance, invoked after harm rather than preventing it in advance.

Karbi Anglong makes this shift visible. The Schedule no longer deters everyday intimidation because it no longer shapes behaviour on the ground. When safeguards become reactive rather than anticipatory, their meaning changes. They cease to define limits and begin instead to manage consequences, leaving space for provocation to test how far those limits have eroded. This is not an administrative oversight. It reflects a political choice to preserve the appearance of autonomy while withholding its force, to maintain the architecture of protection without the authority required to enforce it. In doing so, the State leaves indigenous belonging formally acknowledged but practically exposed.

The issue has also crossed into national oversight. The National Human Rights Commission has issued notices to the Dehradun district administration and police, seeking a factual report and urging measures to ensure the safety of Northeastern students, an intervention that confirms the gravity of the problem, while also underlining how often accountability arrives only after harm has already occurred.

This hollowing out is compounded by the way migration into the region has been governed. The Northeast has always been shaped by movement across hills, valleys and borders, and acknowledging that reality does not require denying its legitimacy. What is new is the sustained refusal to govern that movement honestly. Rights and obligations remain undefined, social contracts are never articulated and communities are left to negotiate coexistence without institutional mediation or political clarity.

In this vacuum, resentment does not need ideology to take hold. It requires only proximity and silence. When protections are weak and responsibilities unclear, anxiety hardens into suspicion, suspicion finds racial language and violence emerges as the outcome of unmanaged tension. To recognise this is not to justify exclusion or retreat into defensiveness; it is to acknowledge that coexistence cannot be sustained by denial alone, nor by constitutional forms emptied of everyday force.

What governing with would require

A different approach would not begin with appeals for harmony or symbolic gestures of reconciliation, but with clarity about authority, responsibility and consequence. Indigenous belonging would be publicly asserted and enforced as a matter of policy rather than sentiment, with the Sixth Schedule operating as a deterrent that shapes behaviour on the ground, instead of a consolation invoked after harm has already occurred. Violations of indigenous dignity would no longer be managed quietly or deferred through procedure, but would trigger responses that are immediate, visible and unmistakable in their intent.

At the same time, migration would be governed rather than absorbed—not through denial or exclusion, but through political honesty about limits, rights and obligations, and through the refusal to rely on the convenient fiction that silence preserves peace. Outside the region, racism directed at Northeastern citizens would be treated not as social misunderstanding or episodic prejudice, but as a failure of citizenship enforcement, addressed through prosecution, institutional accountability and sustained political attention rather than statements of regret.

Most importantly, the burden of adjustment would shift. Northeastern people would no longer be asked to carry the work of making belonging function on their own, compensating for the absence of clear policy through restraint, explanation and endurance. In a political order that governs with rather than over, belonging would cease to be a task assigned to the vulnerable and would instead become a condition guaranteed by the State.

Belonging, settled

The violence in Dehradun and the humiliation in Karbi Anglong wounded not only because of what was done, but because of what remained unresolved beneath both events. Neither incident should have raised questions about who belongs—yet each did, exposing how easily belonging in the Northeast slips from being a settled fact into a matter of dispute, suspicion, or proof.

A democracy that leaves belonging unsettled creates space for cruelty, because uncertainty invites testing and ambiguity invites exploitation. When protection is unreliable, it is pushed until it gives way; when citizenship is conditional, it is used as leverage rather than recognised as a guarantee. The Northeast has lived too long inside this condition, absorbing change without shelter, extending hospitality without assurance and asserting loyalty without receiving protection in return, until uncertainty itself has come to feel routine.

Belonging cannot remain provisional without consequence. A State that refuses to settle it leaves its citizens exposed both at home and away, vulnerable to being challenged where they should be secure and doubted where they should be unquestioned. Until that settlement is made with clarity and force, violence will continue to appear episodic, even as the conditions that produce it remain firmly and predictably in place.

Sangmuan Hangsing is a researcher and alumnus of the Kautilya School of Public Policy.