The continuation of racial abuse against citizens from the North East by their fellow countrymen and women despite legal protection is evident of the fact that these safeguards are simply insufficient
It is an ugly case of an individual’s distraught from gaming drought and consequently, a completely unacceptable behaviour where the person, if a PUBG Clan Name can be borrowed, virtually becomes ‘Frenzy Shooters’ to racially abuse a lawmaker on YouTube. Paras Singh, a resident of Janakpuri in Punjab’s Ludhiana district, in his ire against Pasighat West MLA from Arunachal Pradesh, Ninong Ering, who is also a former Union minister, not only mocked his looks but also doubted if the legislator is an Indian at all.
Singh did not spare the state of Arunachal Pradesh as well in his abominable video. According to the translation by EastMojo, the YouTuber said, “Arre yaar yeh (Arunachal) to China ki side me hai (guys this is on China’s side)” and adds, “yeh China walon ka hi hai (It belongs to the people of China)” before saying “ek tarah se unhi k saath hi hai halka fulka touch hota hai, India me aata hai (in a way they are with them — Arunachal is with China — it touches India a little).”
The trigger behind the abusive video
Although his anger was originally intended to be against the MLA for seeking a ban on a PUBG clone, Singh took little time to shift gears to launch a racial tirade against the lawmaker and the state of Arunachal Pradesh. The YouTuber was angry with Ering because he shot off a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 22 May urging him “to not allow Chinese deception #BattlegroundsMobileIndia” as “it is a big threat to security of India & privacy of our citizens and a way to circumvent & disregard our laws”. The MLA in his letter said that “the new game is simply a relaunch of PUBG mobile, under a new name and new entity.”
Worried that the Central government might actually ban the new game, the 21-year-old Singh expressed his anger through the video. For the YouTuber, who owns two channels on the platform — ‘Paras Official’ and ‘Tech Guru Hindi’ — with 4.60 lakh and 5.30 lakh followers respectively, making the video viral with such demeaning content wasn’t hard enough.
“This YouTuber, who is also a gamer, naturally was angry when I gave the letter to the prime minister. Even when I was an MP I opposed games like PUBG and as an MLA I oppose it. In the recent session of the Assembly, I raised the issue and sought a ban on PUBG in Arunachal Pradesh. When 69 apps were banned last year, PUBG was also among them. But now it has been relaunched as Battlegrounds Mobile India. I objected to it because this is the same version of the earlier PUBG and it is really going to spoil the children in Arunachal Pradesh. My concern is the children and not about how you play the game or how much money you earn. Tencent is a Chinese company that has over 300 games. But that does not mean I am against Tencent or Krafton. I am against the game PUBG because I have seen it is just like the Blue Whale game where people even lose their lives by playing it,” Ering told Firstpost.
It is a different issue altogether that the so-called Blue Whale game and PUBG are nothing like one another.
“In this pandemic, we have enough problems already and now you are bringing in one more. I wrote to the prime minister on those grounds as a citizen of India and I have always raised this issue. If you think this is harmful to the people of India then as a whole there should be a ban or there has to be a control,” he said.
“YouTubers are all against me because they believe it is a game and should not be stopped. But the thing is children from the North East are very simple and they don’t know the bad effects of the game. These bad effects are really dangerous,” the Pasighat West MLA said.
The racial angle
The Arunachal Pradesh legislator is clearly unhappy with the turn of things and the manner in which the whole issue suddenly took a racial turn.
“Let me be very frank. It is the mindset of the youngsters. Right from my own childhood, I have faced this discrimination when way back in 1962 I was called a Naga or even a Chini. We look different. I think our look itself is the defect. People are yet to accept us. It is just like the African Americans in the United States. Even after 200 years, they still face racial discrimination. People from the south are different, people from west India are different, people from Ladakh are different, people from Uttarakhand are different but the youngsters are yet to adapt to that. People from the North East have faced discrimination throughout the country not just in Delhi or Bengaluru. People like to tease us and the youngsters are scapegoats of this culture because they blindly follow it,” said Ering.
The fact that Ering is from the North East provided Singh with all the extra ammunition he needed for his brutal verbal assault.
Jelle JP Wouters and Tanka B Subba in their jointly authored paper —The “Indian Face,” India’s Northeast, and “The Idea of India” — wrote: “Northeasterners are nonrecognized and misrecognized, mirrored back by the wider Indian society as foreigners, hailing from such places as China, Nepal, Thailand, or Japan and on a visit to India, or as “lesser Indians” rather than as equal citizens; and this withholding of equal recognition of “Indianness” works to discriminate against and marginalize them.”
“Racial discrimination will always be there. When I was a Member of Parliament we had raised this issue during Nido Tania’s time and there was this Bezbaruah committee. They recommended that stringent laws must be there, the history and geography of the North East must be there in the textbooks of CBSE and NCERT and that there should be special police chowkis in all the major cities to protect women and children from the North East from racial discrimination,” the Congress leader and former Union minister during the UPA-2 government said.
A 12-member committee was formed under the chairmanship of MP Bezbaruah on 5 February 2014 “to suggest suitable remedial measure which could be taken up by the Government in light of the unfortunate death of Sh. Nido Tania, a student from Arunachal Pradesh”, on 29 January, 2014 after a racist attack in Delhi.
Although the recommendations from the committee came, the implementation has been largely cosmetic with no real impact on the ground. The panel had stated that “words like ‘Momos’, ‘Chinkis’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Chichi Chu Chu’, or any
derogatory remarks relating to race, culture, identity or physical appearances to be made punishable.” Jawaharlal Nehru University, assistant professor with the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Thongkholal Haokip in his paper From ‘Chinky’ to ‘Coronavirus’: racism against Northeast Indians during the COVID-19 pandemic had written that “chinky is considered to ‘an offensive word for a restaurant serving Chinese food,” or simply a Chinese.”
“But gradually I don’t know why we could not take it up and I also came back to the state. There should have been a follow-up on that. Unless and until there are stringent laws this would keep going on. Of course, you cannot say chinki or Chinese to a northeastern guy because if you do that a fine of Rs 5,000 will be imposed. As regards this particular case, I cannot say much because he (Paras Singh) should have concentrated on me but he went after my looks and even Arunachal Pradesh and that is where the problem lies. Anyway, he has been arrested and will be brought to Itanagar. We will leave it to the law,” Ering said.
Cutting across party lines
Singh’s online misadventure or rather his misuse of the platform he mastered upon has only led to a rare unity among political parties in the North East cutting across party lines.
“We have expressed our displeasure in mass media and we are happy that the culprit has been arrested. Let the law take its own course. It should not have happened but it happened. Legally the matter is with the police because he is under custody. The Arunachal Pradesh Police will seek transit remand from a Ludhiana court to bring him to the state,” said Arunachal East Lok Sabha MP and president of the Bharatiya Janata Party Arunachal Pradesh unit, Tapir Gao.
“The lack of knowledge on the North East among many people from the rest of India is evident here. I don’t know this YouTuber may be under the influence of the tukde-tukde gang also. If he is from Punjab, there is a Punjab in Pakistan also. First, the Government of India should prove whether he belongs to Pakistani Punjab or the Indian Punjab. If I am not wrong there is a Ludhiana in Pakistan also. If he is from Indian Punjab then that sort of crooked mindset should not be developed at such a young age,” Gao said.
Lok Sabha MP from Nowgong parliamentary constituency in Assam Pradyut Bordoloi felt that lack of adequate knowledge on the region has led to racial profiling of the citizens of the country from North East India even more.
“We have always been experiencing this kind of ignorance, sectarian and racial bias against the northeastern people even in places like Delhi, the capital of India. It’s prevalent mostly among the half-baked and half-literate people like the ‘YouTuber’ who gave such racial observation. Comparatively the people of the North East have a better geographical and anthropological knowledge about other parts of India,” said Bordoloi.
Meghalaya MLA from the East Shillong constituency Mazel Ampareen Lyngdoh urged upon the Centre to quickly take steps in preventing such incidents in the future.
“These racist comments are reminders of the inherent and systemic discrimination which people from the northeastern states face. It’s incredibly sad to have heard Mr. Ering being the victim of such slurs. There is an urgent requirement for the Union government to implement the recommendations put forward by the Bezbaruah Committee, formed in response to the brutal murder of a boy from the region, the most important of which is including the rich history and culture of the north-eastern states in school curriculum across the country,” the East Shillong MLA said.
“The NDA, which clearly has the political support of all state governments of the North East region, has the authority to do this and there is no excuse for them to say they can’t implement it,” said Lyngdoh.
Another Meghalaya MLA, Miani D Shira from the state’s Ampati Assembly Constituency, wondered about the level of racism common people face even when a known figure like Ering has not been spared.
“Ninong Ering is such a respected politician serving the people for so long. And yet such a prominent figure became a victim of racism. Now you can imagine the kind of situation that normal people on a daily basis have to go through in mainland India. It is not just in Delhi. We have seen over the years that some incident or the other keeps on coming up in all the parts. But there has been a huge uproar this time because he is a prominent leader as well. You can imagine how people who don’t have any connection are quietly facing this sort of racism,” said the Ampati MLA.
Miani, who is also a graduate of the Sri Ram College of Commerce in New Delhi, said that even the educational institutions are not devoid of such incidents.
“When I was a student in Delhi, I had friends from different parts of the country and there were many international students as well. I had friends from Nepal, Africa, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka among others who had to face a lot of racism in Delhi for their skin colour and the way they look. It is a big problem in India. I think it is not just against people from North East India but it is more unfortunate because we are a part of the country and still have to face that,” she said.
Paras Singh, not the first, won’t be the last
What Singh did is only a minuscule part of the racism endemic against people from the North East that has gripped India. The YouTuber is not the first one to enter this despicable club. He is just one of many.
In April 2012, two students from the North East, Richard Loitam and Dana Sylvia Sangma, died after facing racial discrimination in Bengaluru causing widescale protests across the country. Haokip also referred to an incident at a shop in Pune in March last year when a woman covered her mouth with a dupatta when a Mizo girl passed by.
“The non-acknowledgement of the structural nature of racism, it is claimed, shows the complicity of the Indian state. To date, racial discriminations in India are focused on, what Gee and Ford call, ‘the relatively narrow band that emphasizes self-reported racism’ that are primarily overt in nature,” Haokip wrote. “If racial profiling is not timely and adequately addressed it can, ‘reinforces the “us-versus-them” mentality,’ as shown in others studies, and may once again bring back the sense of alienation that the Northeast Indians were once subjected to and further exacerbate it.”
The lack of public discourse on racism as a serious issue in India nearly gives the impression that it is non-existent which is obviously not the truth. Silence cannot hide the true picture.
“We don’t have to wait for such an incident to occur to actually talk about racism happening in our country. I think we have to bring racism into our daily conversation. No matter what policy or what laws we bring in, if it is not inherently placed in our minds this will continue. We have to talk about racism in our educational institutions as well as in our social settings, not just about racism against northeasterners. It has to be starting from our foundation that there is such thing as racism and we have to accept it as a fact and then only we can come up with a solution. Accepting it, is I think, the first step I would say. In India, we fail to talk about the different culture and different kinds of people that live here,” said Miani.
The continuation of racial abuse against citizens from the North East by their fellow countrymen and women despite legal protection is evident of the fact that these safeguards are simply insufficient.
“The persistence of racism sent a strong message that the current legal framework is inadequate to ward-off overt acts of racial discrimination and necessitates a strong anti-racism law for a stronger national integration. Apart from the introduction of strong anti-racism law, the future will depend much on the responsiveness of the law-enforcing agencies and the effectiveness of the criminal justice system related to racism,” the JNU professor said in his paper.
The role of the government is immense in this regard so that there are no more corrupted and polluted minds as we see in the case of Paras Singh. The Bezbaruah committee ïn its submission emphatically stressed the action that has to be taken from the government’s end.
“We are of the firm opinion that government should ensure that any crime of racial nature is viewed very seriously. Recognition of the problems of racial discrimination in all its dimensions should be an essential part of the political discourse a democratic system like India,” the report said.
The time has come and it is now.
