Angel Chakma, a Tripura student who allegedly died following a racist attack in Dehradun, Uttarakhand. (PTI)
NEW DELHI: Amidst outrage over the murder of Anjel Chakma, 24, from Tripura allegedly on racial grounds, a petition has been filed in Supreme Court seeking its intervention to protect people from north-eastern states from hate and racial abuse in other parts of the country.The petition, filed by advocate Anoop Prakash Awasthi, said that people from northeast are subjected to racial abuse across the country and they are targeted as if they are not citizens of the country. He said the repeated humiliation of north-eastern citizens by being called “Chinese” or “chinky” is not merely a matter of individual prejudice but it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of India itself and its civilisational and constitutional vision.Referring to TOI’s report on the last words spoken by the deceased that he was also an Indian while appealing to the attackers not to target him, the petition said it’s a failure of constitutional governance if a citizen has to assert nationality as a defence against violence.”What renders this incident constitutionally searing are the victim’s reported last words, spoken in a moment of existential desperation: “I am Indian… What certificate should we show?” These words are not merely an expression of personal anguish; they constitute an indictment of the Republic’s failure to make citizenship experientially real for all its people. When an Indian citizen, in the moments before death, feels compelled to assert nationality as a defence against violence, the promise of equality before law stands profoundly compromised,” the petition said.It said the question raised by Chakma “what certificate should we show” exposes the informal but pervasive demand placed within our society upon racially distinct Indians to explain their citizenship which is unfortunate as Indianness flows from the Constitution, not from public perception or ethnic conformity.”The killing of Anjel Chakma must therefore be understood as the culmination of a social process rather than an aberration. It demonstrates how racial othering, when left unaddressed, travels a continuum, from verbal abuse to physical assault, and ultimately to homicide. The law’s failure to interrupt this continuum at earlier stages amounts to a failure of constitutional governance. The vulnerability of citizens from the north-eastern States is not an unforeseen or emergent phenomenon. It stands formally acknowledged on the floor of Parliament itself. Centre, through replies given to questions raised in the Lok Sabha in March 2017, placed on record both the prevalence of racial attacks and the absence of any dedicated institutional mechanism to address them. These replies, read together, constitute clear executive admissions of knowledge coupled with inaction,” the petition said.The petitioner said that a young student from Tripura being compelled to utter the words “I am Indian…What certificate should we show?” to avoid death was not merely a personal tragedy but a a civilisational indictment. “The incident was preceded by racial slurs questioning the victim’s nationality and identity, reflecting a deeply entrenched social trope that citizens from the north-eastern states are “outsiders” within their own country, a trope which, when normalised by silence and institutional indifference, escalates from verbal abuse to lethal violence,” the petition said, pleading the SC in intervene to frame guidelines as there was vacuum in policy.”The informal and pervasive demand placed upon north-eastern citizens to “prove” their nationality through appearance, language, or conduct is inherently unconstitutional, arbitrary, and discriminatory, and no such burden is imposed upon citizens whose physical features conform to socially constructed norms,” the petition said.
