December 31, 2025 07:21 AM IST First published on: Dec 31, 2025 at 07:20 AM ISTWe are not Chinese… we are Indians.” These were Anjel Chakma’s last words before he was stabbed on December 9 in Dehradun. They were a plea for recognition that the 24-year-old from Tripura was no less Indian than his assailants. Chakma succumbed to his injuries on December 26, months away from graduating, months away from his dream of working with the French multinational company that had reportedly offered him his first job. The arrests that followed, and the protests that have erupted in Tripura and elsewhere, carry grief and fury.For decades, citizens from the Northeast have, all too often, been made to feel exoticised and othered. Racialised abuse has followed them into classrooms, rented apartments, marketplaces and thoroughfares, even erupting in violence. Chakma’s death joins a grim ledger of such fatalities, including the murder of 20-year-old Nido Taniam from Arunachal Pradesh in the Capital in 2014. Earlier, in 2012, following ethnic clashes in Assam, there was an exodus of people from the Northeast from cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune, spurred by the mass circulation of inflammatory messages. Over the past decade or so, in a culture of impunity, hyper-nationalist rhetoric that flattens diversity and the absence of meaningful legal deterrence — the recommendations of the Bezbaruah Committee set up after Taniam’s murder remain largely unimplemented — have combined to make old prejudices more strident.AdvertisementIn the aftermath of Chakma’s death, Tripura CM Manik Saha reached out to Uttarakhand CM Pushkar Dhami seeking justice. But what the murder demands is both accountability in the courtroom and honesty in the public square. It calls for a deeper societal reckoning with what it means to belong in a diverse nation, to be sensitive to the complexities of identity. Instead of reducing pluralism to mere lip service, it must be fostered actively — taught early, reinforced often — in schools, universities and workplaces. In acknowledging the tragedy of Chakma’s death, the nation must confront wider complicities in the conditions that led to it.