COMMENTARY
How Not to Fight
Discrimination in India
Desire, Difference and the North East
R K Debbarma
Debates on racism and
discrimination in India tend to
insulate the self in two ways.
One, racist acts are attributed
to the fringe element. Two, the
origin of racist and discriminatory
acts is imputed to the victims.
A comment on the need for a
non-insulated account of the
self, which can engender a
transformative politics.
R K Debbarma (r.debbarma@tiss.edu) is at the
Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW june 25, 2016
T
he obsession with India’s past,
pride and self-worth has engen-
dered extraordinary stifling of dis-
sent, and normalised violence against
those who call for these passions to be
tempered with humility. These brazen
illiberal outbursts, accompanied by
incendiary utterances are usually credited
to “fringe elements” by the media and by
those who claim to hold liberal attitu-
des, at least in public. Such a declaration
is crucial for my purpose here, for it en-
capsulates a muted discomfiture that
serves to elucidate the pervasive, syste-
matic discriminations which people from
the North East are confronted with.
Juxtaposed against these confrontations
in a caste-ridden, racialised India, the
so-called “fringe element” appears to be
the dominant mode of experience.
Simultaneously, this obsession has
also triggered extraordinary opposition
and resistance such as the protests by
the Ambedkar–Periyar Study Circle (IIT
Madras), the protests by writers/artists,
and the recent protests taking place in
various universities across India. How-
ever, this obsession with the past, pride
and self-worth appears to accord posi-
tive attention towards ending discrimi-
nation against people from the North
vol lI nos 26 & 27
East. Hardly a month passes by without
an event dedicated to changing percep-
tions about the region—the National
Youth Festival, Light Up North East Fes-
tival, Monsam Keri Youth Festival—all
geared towards dispelling negative per-
ceptions. My primary focus will be the
widely shared news of University of
Hyderabad and Osmania University’s
attempt to end bias against the North
East by introducing courses on the cul-
ture and history of the region. This arti-
cle is a critique of such endeavours—
especially the desire to teach the rest
of India the uniqueness of the region—
primarily because they proceed from an
uncritical evaluation of the self, a self
tethered to a certain kind of politics that
perpetuates discrimination and racism.
‘North East’ in the Curriculum
The assumption that inclusion of the
“North East” in the curriculum would
help in changing how the region and the
people are perceived in India is highly
erroneous. It also directs the origin of
discrimination and racism in India away
from the everyday practices of the domi-
nant community that produce and rein-
force its cultural superiority. Such an ap-
proach finds faults with the region—
remoteness, inability to register in the
minds of the majority—and not in the
practices of superiority and the privileges
that accrue from these practices. As such,
by its very logic, with its emphasis on
unique heritage and culture, these courses
would merely inculcate uncritical re-
ceived knowledge of the region—of uni-
que history, of fantastic culture—and not
of critical reflections of history and culture.
25
COMMENTARY
But, of course, such an assumption
serves both the Hindu supremacist and
certain kinds of identity politics in the
region. For the Hindu supremacist, it
deflects the origin of his or her racism,
or provides comfort by doubting its very
existence. One only has to look at how
big media titled its discussions when
racist attacks spread across Indian cities.
They all ended with question marks, a
point clarified by Duncan McDuie-Ra
(2015). In fact, as Yengkhom Jilangamba
(2012) points out, most Indians refused
to acknowledge that racism exists in
India. Even those who do acknowledge
its existence impute it to fringe ele-
ments: yes, some are racist, not all are.
Such a position is very unhelpful in
talking about racism, as Frantz Fanon
(1952: 66) pointed out; either a society
is racist or it is not. Taking a cue from
Fanon’s analysis, it is important to
insist that racism is the by-product
of a racialised society; to impute
it to fringe elements is naive. My
concern here is the racialised relations
between the “Indian face” (Wouters
and Subba 2013) and the people from
the North East.
For the identity politics in the region,
such an assumption helps unleash its
own desire for establishing one’s supe-
riority. As someone one who is from
this region and located in the region, I
am constantly reminded to be proud of
its history, heroes, places and culture.
No doubt these tendencies have always
been present in the region, but the
obsession is novel. And, of late, it
has largely been aggressively promoted
by certain sections from within the re-
gion, especially on social media. It is
in this inflated conception of one’s
self-worth, contingent on uncritical
appreciation of the past, which ani-
mates complicated politics of differ-
ence, that I wish to locate racism and
discrimination; not in ignorance and
prejudices.
My earlier description of such an ass-
umption as erroneous rests on this fact
that to acknowledge another human be-
ing as worthy of equal treatment does
not require knowledge about their cul-
tural worth or historical legacy. After
all, was it not through knowledge that
26
the colonial powers produced racism, in-
vested it with meaning, and reinforced
superiority based on skin colour? Per-
haps, a more worthy endeavour would
be to introduce a course on India’s cul-
tural history of superiority, of everyday
rituals through which this superiority is
preserved. Given these circumstances, it
is imperative that one questions such
politics as ghar wapsi. It perpetuates
uncritical acceptance of Hinduism and
posits Hindus as superior. In India, one
cannot understand discrimination out-
side this logic. Those who cannot
question the caste system can never
appreciate the other, no matter how
many courses he or she takes on the
North East.
Fighting Racial Discrimination
Of course the pedagogical value incor-
porating the curriculum on the region
cannot be belittled (Nawani 2014), but
as a mechanism for fighting racial dis-
crimination, it is a useless endeavour. It
merely deflects the problem or the source
of the problem, the origin of discrimina-
tion and racism. I am not trying to dis-
parage the attempts being made at the
University of Hyderabad and Osmania
University to fight discrimination, rather
I am trying to show why it cannot
account for the ways in which racism
manifests and perpetuates discrimi-
natory beliefs and practices. In fact, this
endorses the very practices on which
racism is located: infallibility of one’s
values, a barricaded culture, being
closed to self-criticism. The fight against
racial discrimination has to begin with
the (wo)man in the mirror.
By its very nature, academia should be
a utopian space, for talking to each other,
and not a space for teaching cultural and
historical myths. Perhaps, it might even
help not knowing another person’s his-
tory; histories can be unhelpful here.
Should we not respect Germans because
of their Nazi past? It is fallacious to say
that we need to know someone’s past
and culture to accord him or her mutual
respect and symmetrical treatment.
Such appreciation is in fact impossible.
We cannot know everyone’s culture;
does that mean we should discriminate
against them?
june 25, 2016
Food and the ‘Local’
Discrimination, then, is not an outcome
of unknowing the other, rather it is em-
bedded in or originates in knowing the
self. It is reified and perpetuated through
the unearned advantages one acquires
from discriminating the other; how one
knows the self, and this source of know-
ing is one’s own culture and history. Per-
haps, then, an anti-discriminatory poli-
tics must begin through recognition of
the limitations and fallibility of one’s
knowledge about one’s culture and his-
tory; not in its certainty. An ethical
dialogue proceeds from the acknowl-
edgement of cultural and historical
embellishment, and the recognition of
their fallibility. Therefore, the assump-
tion that teaching Indians about the
uniqueness of the region, and the desire
to be counted through inclusion in the
national syllabus, flags off an uneasy
association of the discriminated-self
with the rabid obsession of the past
and culture.
Discrimination is not only about nega-
tive perceptions or prejudices, as some
commentators would want us to believe,
and would point to prejudices held by peo-
ple from the North East against Indians
(Rajkhowa 2014; Liang and Naulak
2014). Discrimination is about distri-
bution of power and privileges. Any
attempt to end discrimination, without
accounting for privileges and power is
insufficient. For example, in the univer-
sity spaces, discrimination and intoler-
ance towards the region stems from the
entrenched privilege enjoyed by particu-
lar cultural groups in using these spaces.
The University of Hyderabad is a good
example, and food is the best way to
understand racism in this country. I
remember, as a first-year master’s stu-
dent, one night when a large group of
students knocked on rooms occupied by
students from the North East, to check
who cooked a particularly offensive
food. They were not there to police the
illegality of cooking in hostel rooms, but
the immorality of cooking certain types
of meat. This was moral policing
endorsed by the authorities and wit-
nessed by the hostel community. As a
community, the students from the
region were allowed to express their
vol lI nos 26 & 27 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

“unique” culture, but food had to be
enjoyed secretly, and not be expressed.
Expression of food immediately incites
public moral outrage and policing or
official injunction.
My master’s years at the university
were also the period when students
from the region swelled in numbers.
Cooking in rooms, illegal but not
uncommon, suddenly became a concern
for the university authorities. The con-
cern, as the story narrated above would
suggest, perhaps had to do with the
immorality rather than the illegality of
it. To tackle the menace, the authorities
promised to assign an ethnic kitchen
where students from the region could
cook their food. The demand for a North
East mess, similar to the North Indian
mess, was declined and we were told to
appreciate “local” food. While culture
could be expressed openly and enjoyed
by the university community, food had
to be hidden, away from public view,
inexpressible. Its enjoyment could only
take place inside a designated secluded
space.
One might be tempted to grant this as
an exceptional case. But, take the case of
the IIT Guwahati mess. In 2009, I had
stayed with a friend (who graduated
from University of Hyderabad and joi-
ned a research programme at IIT) there.
On the evening of my arrival, he was
vexed about buying breakfast. On my
enquiry as to what was wrong with the
breakfast in the mess, he had des-
pairingly remarked: “Tomorrow is Dosa-
Idli morning, lots of students from South
India.” I was reminded of the sanctimo-
nious University of Hyderabad official
who admonished the students from the
North East to appreciate local food.
This was a telling case, where food
served in university messes had nothing
to do with the location. It has to do with
discriminatory regimes of what is toler-
able and what is potentially offensive
(Gorringe and Karthikeyan 2014), a re-
gime which legitimates the operation of
racism and superiority. The canteen at
the North–Eastern Hill University guest
house does not serve local Khasi food
either. The canteen staff usually cite two
reasons for this prohibition: strict instru-
ctions by authorities, and that most
Economic & Political Weekly EPW june 25, 2016
Indian guests are averse to eating local
food. This is why one must be alert to
not conflate prejudices and racial dis-
crimination. A similar situation prevails
at the canteen in Mizoram University.
Perhaps the most illuminating story
comes from Nagaland University’s Med-
ziphema campus (story shared by Dolly
Kikon and Sanjay Barbora). A handful of
students from outside the region, who
are averse to eating local food, were
assigned institute quarters where they
could escape exposure to local food
habits. Two points are crucial for my
purpose here. One, “local” is a misno-
mer, the boundary here is non-
geographical. Rather, it is the boundary
between profane and sacred. “Local” is a
name for everyday deployment of
hegemonic power, masquerading in cos-
mopolitanism. Locality, then, is the quo-
tidian inscription of discriminatory
spaces for the construction of the
superior self.
Two, the dissimilarity in institutional
strategies for activating these discrimi-
natory spaces—consigning offensive
food habits to designated spaces and the
creation of safe spaces—convey a singu-
lar function, enforcing of superiority.
Culture, dress and dances are expressi-
ble, but food needs to be banished from
public view. It can be allowed to be exp-
ressed inside enclosed sequestered
spaces, often temporary or transitory
spaces of pleasure, such as food courts,
where profane offensive acts of eating
non-pure food is regulated. Once enter-
tained, they are to return back to the ori-
gin. They cannot become part of the rep-
ertoire of Indian culture. Such spaces
are sanctioned or nurtured by what
Michel Foucault (1984) calls “hidden
presence of the sacred,” imbued with
inviolable oppositions that render eating
certain food abnormal or impure. A spa-
tial strategy for maintaining privileges,
it is but an instantiation of coercive pow-
er. The ethnic kitchen at the University
of Hyderabad—usually used by students
from the North East—is a by-product of
the discriminatory regimes. It is a mark-
er of discrimination.
This expulsion of food habits and the
protection of the Indian self or face
(Wouters and Subba 2013) from exposure
vol lI nos 26 & 27
COMMENTARY
to the profane is an enduring feature of
Indian society, accepted as valid, but-
tressed and imposed by social and ad-
ministrative institutions. As such, the
prevailing fashion to blame the rising
intolerance in India to the so-called
fringe element appears disingenuous.
The ability to execute violence and moral
policing against those they consider
anti-Indian is the outcome of the endur-
ing regime of intolerances that people
from the North East are subjected to
every day. Perhaps, what repels the lib-
erals more is not so much the illiberal
witless acts, but the inability of those
who witness it and are appalled by it to
do anything. The fringe element, then,
is not a fringe; their intolerances are
uttered and performed right on the na-
tional pedestal. Maybe the fringe, then,
is occupied by the few academicians,
students, artists and writers who are
able to mark out a tiny space on the
national canvas from which to resist and
speak out against the rising intolerance.
‘Self’ in the North East
What follows from the above analysis is
the recognition that the quotidian dep-
loyment of hegemonic notions casts peo-
ples of this region as inferior or even as
the insignificant other. This is why, in
order to understand the operation and
perpetuation of discrimination, one has
to look at the production of one’s cultural
superiority and the practices that inform
unstated norms and rules that govern
this relationship. The origin of racial dis-
crimination needs to be located in what/
how the racists think of themselves (Fe-
agin et al 2001). It roots itself in people’s
belief in the infallibility of culture, closed
to self-criticism, and in the inability to
acknowledge the limits imposed on indi-
viduals by customs, culture and identity.
This belief in infallibility affects the expe-
riences of people from the North East in a
predominantly Hindu India. Thus, incor-
porating the unique culture, history, and
heritage of the region into the syllabi will
not make a dent in how people in general
think about discrimination in India. But,
it will surely do one thing. This brings me
to my final, most important, but provi-
sional analysis: conception of the self in
the North East.
27
COMMENTARY
Contemporary political investments,
in ending discrimination against people
from the North East, seek to sculpt
mirror images of the Indian self onto the
multiple identity groups in the region.
The numerous state-sponsored so-called
youth festivals, most of these event-
managed by the military, are unabash-
edly couched in macho language—to
inculcate in the youth masculine quali-
ties, such as, strength, energy, and
brotherhood—to show the world, and
make India a superpower. And, the res-
ponses from within the region have been
equally brazen: unembarrassed trum-
peting of its unique cultures and places,
and peddling of heroes who supposedly
belong to certain communities. Both
these projects treat the enclosed com-
munities as their objects of desire, to be
invested with excessive self-love and
brazen belief in self-worth.
Fossilisation of Beliefs
To be sure, these attempts to carve out
unique identities or communities in the
region are not new, having roots in Brit-
ish India’s colonialism, being an endur-
ing mode of governance since then.
Power and rights entitlements are dele-
gated by the state to a community.
Accords and agreements are usually
signed between the state and a particu-
lar identity group, a deeply troubling
politics opposed by Hanna Arendt in her
criticism of the formation of Israel (But-
ler 2007). It helps if an identity group is
able to mobilise and display its unity and
capacity for violence against the state or
other identity groups. What we are wit-
nessing in the region today is the fossili-
sation of beliefs in a delegated community,
a community rooted in a particular place,
as a political value. Political power is exclu-
sively gifted to these communities, a pow-
er that flows from the core, which repli-
cates itself as a colonial arrangement.
But, the irony is that communities
constructed on such desires cannot be-
come self-authorising political agents,
capable of building and sustaining a
truly democratic politics on its own.
These would always require divine as-
sistance, the Indian state as the authoris-
ing agent. This is because the unique-
ness of these places claimed by delegated
28
communities does not lie in their
isolation or exclusion, but what is signi-
ficant (not unique) is the encounter
through which shared politics of connec-
tions and proximity with others come
into existence. I am reminded of Mah-
mood Mamdani’s (2012: 8) pithy remark
that “the origin of civilisation... is not in
a place but in an encounter.” Therefore,
difference is not defined by unique cul-
tures or histories, but through proximi-
ty, by owing each other something—his-
torically, culturally and politically. After
all, if all the cultures are unique, what is
unique anymore? Dolly Kikon (2015a)
makes a compelling argument when she
asserts that regions’ uniqueness must lie
in people’s ability to sit together, even
after violence, and talk about peace.
Therefore, it would make more sense
to view the situation in the region (of
course this is not unique to the region)
as intercultural, or, to use Paul Ricœur’s
(2011) formulation, “bound up” with each
other; not a region where multiple cul-
tures exist in idyllic innocence, cloistered
from each other. Such a reciprocal rela-
tionship can also be found in terms of
food habits (Kikon 2015b). Identity poli-
tics based on denial of these facts can
only originate through violence, both
physical and cultural. Within such a pol-
itics, there are no longer innocent vic-
tims in ethnic violence, not because they
are not innocent, but because it has be-
come impossible, or rather unthinkable,
within this form of identity politics where
allegiance to a community is comman-
ded. For, this is the only medium through
which the state allows an individual to
feel secure and acquire entitlements.
How does one make sense of the
appeal by the All Assam Koch Students’
Union—such appeals are made by
almost all communities in the region—
to unite as a single entity, in order to as-
sert their rights, and that those who
identify as Rajbongshi should return to
Koch mainstream (Assam Tribune 2015).
It may be too radical a position to aver,
but innocence of victims of ethnic vio-
lence can only be recovered through rec-
ognition of an alternative politics fashi-
oned through acknowledgement of int-
ercultural multiplicity. For violence and
death will no longer be seen as a service
june 25, 2016
to the community, where blame is no
longer directed against a community,
and where every part is no longer held
as complicit. As long as the identity poli-
tics in the region is contingent on the
impulse to be a delegated community,
current practices of blaming the entire
community—for acts committed by an
individual or a group belonging to that
community—will predominate perspec-
tives. Within such a world view there are
no innocents.
The conception of the self in the North
East, then, formed by the desire to be a
delegated community (endowed with
entitlement), is impregnated with quali-
ties and tendencies that serve as a mir-
ror image to the core. They are merely
convenient props for governance and
state-building. Only in and through rec-
ognition of the limitations and oppres-
sive nature of one’s culture and history
can we ethically confer mutual respect.
Demanding prior appreciation of others’
culture/history, for according ethical
treatment, merely creates classificatory
scales—some appreciated, others not.
This is a slippery slope: one ends up
appreciating every culture as valid and
valuable. Perhaps only one who is capa-
ble of accepting the limitation of one’s
culture can actually acknowledge rac-
ism. Our refusal to tolerate others’ acts,
which we consider offensive, forecloses,
in advance, the possibility for a mutual
relationship and coexistence.
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