By Karuna Madan
New Delhi: Many students from the Northeast feel that the Centre has treated their region as an “unwanted child” and made scant efforts to integrate the northeastern population with the mainstream. There have been several incidents till date in Delhi and elsewhere of people from the Northeast being ill treated.
May 2005: The targeting of northeastern girls for sexual abuse was highlighted the first time when a call centre employee from Mizoram was gang-raped in Southwest Delhi in 2005, infamously referred as the “Dhaula Kuan gang rape case”, which grabbed the attention of the national and international media at that time. The 20-year-old Delhi University student was abducted by four carborne accused in the wee hours of May 8, 2005. They later dumped her in Dhaula Kuan after raping her.
October 2009: Ramchanphy Hongray, a 19-year-old girl from Manipur was sexually assaulted, strangled to death and burnt at her rented apartment at Munirka in south Delhi by Pushpam Sinha, a PhD scholar working at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
December 2010: A 30-year-old call centre employee, hailing from Manipur, was picked up by four drunken men in south Delhi and gang-raped for over 40 minutes in a moving vehicle. According to the police, the woman had been staying in the area for the past four years. She and her colleague, also from the Northeast, had told the cab driver to drop them outside the gate of their colony. They were walking towards the gate and were barely 100 metres from it, when four men who were sitting inside a tempo goods carrier, grabbed one of them. The other woman managed to escape.
May 2012: Manipuri student Richard Loitam was found dead in his hostel room in Bangalore. Loitam’s friends and family alleged that the 19-year-old died as a consequence of an assault by his seniors. The police had earlier registered a case of an unnatural death, but after several protests in Bangalore and New Delhi, booked a case of murder against two students.
Loitam, a second-semester student of the Acharya NRV School of Architecture in Bangalore North, was found dead in his hostel bed on the afternoon of April 18, 2012.
On the night of April 17, Loitam reportedly quarrelled with two students Vishal and Sayed, who allegedly hit the Manipur student on the face and head. Following the altercation, Richard returned to his room and was found dead the next day.
August 2012: Around 20 people from the Northeast were beaten up in separate incidents in the upscale Kondhwa in Pune in August, 2012.
Police registered several complaints of rioting against unidentified persons and began a probe but it did not deter the exodus of Northeasterners from Pune. Eight students from Nagaland were reportedly attacked in Poona College and two in Kondhwa, while five Kuki students were allegedly beaten up when they went to Poona College. Some complainants had reportedly told the police that their attackers asked them if they were from Assam, and assaulted them without waiting for a reply.
2011: Attacks on people from the Northeast in Bangalore and threat calls to students in Hyderabad deepened insecurity among workers and students in 2011 and hundreds crammed into trains in Pune, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and even Goa, to head home. It is believed that over 4,000 people belonging to the Northeast booked train tickets out of Bangalore on a single day.
Four Assamese men were stopped by unidentified assailants and attacked with soda bottles, said a complaint in Bangalore. Elsewhere, three Manipuri men were beaten up near a bus shelter and in the third attack, a 23-year-old Manipuri man was thrashed while buying vegetables.
As Bangalore’s glitzy restaurants and spas scaled down services because of the lack of staff, students from Hyderabad and Osmania University joined wage workers from Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram and Assam in packing bags and heading home.
Karnataka State Home Minister R Ashoka issued a statement last year releasing some facts. “In the immediate episode of violence against people from the Northeast, as many as 16,000 people from the region have fled Karnataka. Due to the government’s efforts, the exodus has reduced though,” the statement read.
May 29, 2013: A.S. Reingamphi from Choithar village, Ukhrul district of Manipur, was found dead in her rented accommodation in Chirag Dilli of South Delhi. There were signs of brutal assault on her nose, face and legs.
The deceased girl’s relatives submitted a complaint to the police station charging the landlord and his brother-in-law of sexually assaulting and murdering Reingamphi, but no action was taken. It was only after three days of sustained pressure after hundreds of protesters gathered in various parts of Delhi, that the police finally lodged a complaint.