The Uttarakhand police are trying to spin the patently racial killing of a young student from Tripura in Dehradun on December 27 as just a street brawl gone too far. It is typical of Indian law enforcement to deflect attention from the true nature of identity-based violence that is rampant in India, fuelled by the aggressive othering fostered by the ruling dispensation.
Just this winter, we have witnessed mob harassment of Christians celebrating Christmas at several places, lynching of Muslim Bengali workers in Odisha, and ethnic conflict in Karbi Anglong in Assam.
The killing of Anjel Chakma, a 24-year-old MBA student from Tripura studying in Dehradun, clearly stemmed from racial prejudice. He and his brother were targeted by six men with slurs like "Chinky" and “momo”, and attacked with knives and blunt objects.
The young men’s protestations of being Indian made no difference to the assailants, nor would have the fact that their BSF serviceman father guards the country’s borders.
The killing has generated nation-wide outrage over racism against Indians from the Northeast, a form of hate crime that is all-too common across the rest of India. However, the uproar tends to be sporadic and specific to each incident, and wanes with the news cycle. Such a momentary response allows the malaise to remain lodged in the institutional system, allowing agencies to misrepresent its true seriousness.
Indeed, there is merit in a suggestion made in a public interest litigation (PIL) filed in the Supreme Court after the brutal killing of Anjel Chakma to formally recognise racial violence against Northeast citizens as hate crime – which it indisputably is. That, at the very least, will improve the institutional response to such incidents. It will go some way towards addressing the systemic exclusion of people from the Northeast from economic and social opportunities in what we call mainstream India.
Despite the ubiquity of identity-based prejudice, India lacks a national hate crime monitor, which limits the public’s awareness of the problem and stifles the response to it. The National Crime Records Bureau’s annual Crime in India report has stopped categorising crimes of prejudice except those against women, children, and Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe people. It discontinued tracking hate crimes/lynching after 2017 due to "unreliable" data, instead classifying such incidents as "rioting" or "public mischief". This does not accurately describe the nature of the problem and, in fact, works to obscure it.
Some civil society agencies have tried to fill this void, and their reports indicate huge underreporting. The Association for Protection of Civil Rights (APCR)'s latest Hate Crimes Tracker report recorded 947 hate-related incidents in the one year to June 2025, mainly targeting Muslims and Christians. These included 602 documented hate crimes, 173 of them involving physical assault, 25 resulting in deaths, all Muslim. The self-claimed heartland states headed this scroll of infamy: Uttar Pradesh had the highest number of cases (217), followed by Madhya Pradesh (84), Maharashtra (68), Jharkhand (52), and Uttarakhand (36).
In comparison, the NCRB’s FIR-based reports capture only about 20% of such cases and then camouflage them in generic categories. This allows the authorities to ignore prejudice as motive, which is tantamount to a systemic cover-up. A centralised monitor with a real-time dashboard, such as the system maintained by the American FBI, would give us a more accurate picture of how prejudice is corroding our society.