Northeast India Migrants Face Backlash After Move To Big Cities in India

Malsawma and his sister Lawmkim say they have faced discrimination since moving to New Delhi from Mizoram three years ago. Social activists say migrants from North East India are routinely harassed and assaulted in India's capital city. Pics Rick Westhead/TORONTO STAR

By Rick Westhead

New Delhi,May 14 : From the moment Lawmkim moved to India’s teeming capital from her sleepy village three years ago, locals made their feelings clear about her arrival in the neighbourhood.

“All the time people call me ‘Chinky,’ so often that I can’t tell you how many times,” the 27-year-old says. “It makes me angry but what can I do?”

Like many Indians from this massive country’s northeast corridor, Lawmkim, who is from tiny Mizoram state, has a broad face and almond-shaped eyes, features that make her both easy to pick out and pick on.

In April, she and her older brother Malsawma, 36, were assaulted by a neighbour in their apartment complex, several months after they cut down a spy camera they found installed on their neighbour’s home.

The camera was just a few feet away from their own home and was trained on their bathroom. It was the second camera Malsawma discovered. After he cut down the first last summer, his neighbour’s wife promised it wouldn’t happen again.

“There was nothing for a few months and then last month I saw him peeping at my sister again over the balcony and I yelled,” Malsawma said. “He and a friend came over and beat me with cricket bats and a field hockey stick. This would not have happened with someone who had not come here from outside.”

The attackers only left after Lawmkim apologized for the trouble. She then took her brother to a hospital where they were both given stitches.

India promotes itself as the world’s largest democracy, a country where race and religion aren’t supposed to stand in the way of anyone scrambling to create a better life.

And yet as millions of rural Indians flock to large cities in search of better jobs and schooling — some 350,000 residents of northeast India have moved to New Delhi since 2005 — social activists say there is a sinister underbelly to the country’s “India Shining” story.

Activists say the assault on Malsawma and the spying on his sister is illustrative of discrimination ranging from verbal and physical assaults to rape, human trafficking and murder that some migrants face upon their arrival in New Delhi and other large cities.

“It’s a reflection of India’s longstanding caste system,” said Madhu Chandra, who runs the North East Support Centre and Helpline.

Pointing to his own face, Chandra, who is also from northeast India, said, “this face doesn’t fit in the system, so we become outcasts and outsiders, viewed as strangers who are polluting the local culture.”

In a recent two-year survey, Chandra concluded 86 per cent of migrants from northeast India have faced discrimination in New Delhi.

The survey, which examined migrants arriving in the capital since 2005, recorded 56 cases of groping and other crimes against women, 25 cases of assault and five murders.

“We have had two assaults recently against boys from the northeast in Delhi where the boys were beaten while they were walking in the street but nobody took their mobile phones, money or ATM cards,” Chandra said. “During the beatings, both asked ‘why are you hitting me?’ No one answered them.”

The problem, Chandra said, may be more widespread than his statistics suggest.

Local police routinely refuse to file reports, which keeps the number of incidents low and helps to ensure unsolved crimes stay off their books.

The New Delhi neighbourhood of Munirka is known as the most dangerous for new migrants, Chandra said.

Only a few blocks away from the leafy boulevards of New Delhi’s diplomatic quarter, Munirka is a tangle of narrow streets where Hindu Jats have lived for centuries. Swastikas, a traditional Hindu symbol before it was co-opted by the Nazis, are featured on the steel gates of many homes.

“I remember when I could swim in the Yamuna River and was afraid to walk home by myself because of all the wildlife in Delhi,” says Zile Singh, 74, who was born in Munirka and now sells buffalo milk to local residents.

About five years ago, Singh said, the neighbourhood’s makeup began to change as northeasterners rented tiny one-room flats. Now, roughly 3,000 of the 10,000 residents are migrants, several locals said.

The result has been a clash of cultures, with arch-conservative Jats living alongside northeastern families, many of whom see nothing wrong with young women living western lifestyles — having boyfriends or wearing provocative tops and short shorts.

“It’s not good, the children see this,” said Singh, rattling off a list of indiscretions he says migrants regularly commit.

One evening this week, as Poonam Singh prepared dinner for her children, she gave an account of her husband Yudhvir Singh’s battle with Malsawma.

“They run across our balcony and run on our roof all the time and they run around the streets with no clothes on,” Poonam said.

Her husband was the one was attacked by Malsawma, she added.

If India is to truly become a global power, it will have to figure out how to convince residents from varied backgrounds to get along. The management consulting firm McKinsey estimates 70 per cent of India’s jobs will be found in cities by 2030.

Afraid to return to their own apartment, Lawmkim and her brother stay with nearby friends yet neither regrets moving to New Delhi from their village near India’s border with Burma.

“I came here for a job,” Lawmkim said. “That’s all I want.”

****

By Rick Westhead is South Asia Bureau for TORONTO STAR