Imagine waking up in a city that is supposed to be yours. You have come here chasing a dream: to crack the civil services examination conducted by Union Public Service Commission (UPSC), to sit across an interview panel one day and serve the very nation you were born to. You make chai in a small fourth- floor flat. You call an electrician to fix the air conditioner. While fixing, dust falls. And then, without warning, your entire humanity is reduced to a slur.– That is what happened in Malviya Nagar, Delhi, on February 20,2026.Three young women from Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur, one of them preparing rigorously for the civil services examination, became the target of a torrent of racial abuse at the hands of their neighbours, Harsh Singh and his wife Ruby Jain. What began as a complaint about drilling dust escalating from the fourth floor became a masterclass in cruelty. The accused couple reportedly call the women ‘momo’, ‘sex workers’, ‘parlour ladies’ and ‘drug addicts.’Ruby Jain was heard saying, in Hindi, that the women worked at massage parlours for five hundred rupees. She asked them to ‘go and sell momos.’ Her husband reportedly called them ‘gutter chaap (trash or uncivilsed)’ and declared that ‘northeast people are shit.’ A video of the altercation went viral on social media, sparking national outrage. An FIR has been lodged against the couple under sections of the BNS sections 79, 351(2), 3(5) and 196 including those pertaining to outraging the woman’s modesty and promoting enmity on grounds of race. As of this writing, no arrests have been made.One of the victims, in the video, says something which is impossible to ignore:“We are as much Indian as anyone else. Why are we treated like outsiders just because we are from the Northeast? We, too, have the right to live with equality and dignity.”She is right. And the fact that she even has to say it, the fact that it needs to be stated aloud, in the capital of a democracy, is the indictment.This is not a new story. It is, depressingly, an old one in new clothes.In 2014, a twenty-year-old from Arunachal Pradesh named Nido Tania stopped at a Delhi market to ask for directions. The shopkeeper and his friends mocked his dress and hair. The brawl that followed killed him. His death shocked the entire nation briefly. Politicians marched, pledges were made, editorials were written and then the world moved on. Time magazine, covering the killing, noted that Alana Golmei, founding member of the Northeast Support Centre and Helpline, received half a dozen distress calls a week from people facing racial harassment in the capital. That was twelve years ago.In 2023, a 22- year-old freelance writer from Assam wrote on social media about a neighbour in Old Gupta Colony who had been harassing her and her friends for weeks, screaming slurs about ‘prostitutes’ coming to the building. Her post went viral. People were outraged. And then the world moved on. A 31 -year-old woman, quoted by The Print, described walking on her university campus in Delhi over a decade ago, when men on bikes pulled up beside her and asked: ‘What is your rate?’ She said she eventually dressed ‘more Indian’ and avoided dating men from the northeast to fit in. Even years later, she expressed that the city has not fundamentally changed for her. She remained perpetually guarded, never truly feeling secure there.The pattern is exhausting in its consistency. Young people from the eight northeastern states migrate to Delhi by the thousands each year, seeking education, opportunity, and the life that every Indian city promises its citizens. What they often find instead is a gauntlet. Landlords refuse to rent to them, neighbours treat them as exotic intruders, strangers reduce them to racial caricatures involving food and assumed sexual availability and a system that has historically been very slow to protect them.The racism directed at Northeastern communities in India operates through a particular insidious logic. The same cultural practices that define these communities, get reinterpreted through a mainland lens as evidence of moral laxity or sexual availability. And the culture is not misunderstood by accident but is deliberately read wrong.What makes this dynamic especially damaging is that racism and sexism are deeply entangled here, each feeding the other. A Northeastern woman is not discriminated against only for her ethnicity or for her gender. She is targeted at the intersection of both, where her appearance signals ‘outsider’ and her cultural freedom is twisted as an invitation for harassment.Here is a truth that is difficult and necessary: in a racist world, simply not being racist is not enough. Non- racism is a passive state. It means you personally would not call someone a slur. It means you wince when you hear the word ‘momo’ used as a weapon. It means that you share an outrage post and feel the clean conscience of someone who has done their part. But racism is not passive. It is active, structural and perpetually self-renewing.It lives in the landlord who refuses a tenant from Manipur. It lives in the colleague who says, ‘You don’t look Indian’. It lives in the police officer who was present on the spot when three women were racially abused in Malviya Nagar, and the accused still walks free. Passive non- racism in the presence of active racism is functionally, complicity.Anti racism is an ongoing practice. It requires actively identifying racist policy, racist speech, racist gaze and racist silence and then doing something about it. It requires the by standers in the Malviya Nagar building to have intervened. It requires the broker who subsequently told the women to vacate their flat to have refused. It requires the police to make arrests. It requires the institutions to have standing policies against racial harassment, with real teeth. And it requires ordinary people to speak, loudly and persistently, even when the viral moment has passed.The broader implications of this Malviya Nagar case extends far beyond that one building. They reach into every housing society that has an unspoken policy against renting to northeastern tenants. They reach into every office where ‘chinky’ is still treated as a harmless joke. They reach into every school where the history, culture and contributions of eight northeastern states are absent from the curriculum, making them legible to their fellow Indians only as stereotype.India cannot claim to be one nation while treating eight of its states as foreign countries. The people who migrate from them to Delhi or other metros are not guests to be tolerated. They are citizens exercising a constitutional right. What is needed is not performative outrage that lasts until the next new cycle. It is structural.It means swift and consequential legal actions against racial harassment. It means anti-discrimination clauses in rental agreements enforced by local administration. It means school curricula that teach children who the Naga people are, what Manipuri classical dance means, what Arunachal Pradesh’s biodiversity represents, so that a northeastern face is not an exotic face but a familiar and respected one. It also means intervention training as in teaching people that silence, when someone is being racially abused in front of them, is a choice. It means recognising that every time a young woman from northeast is told she is a sex worker because of where she was born, India fails its own constitution.Delhi is a city of arrivals. It has always been. Every wave of migration has made it larger, louder, more complicated and ultimately richer. The northeastern communities who have come to study, to work, to dream are part of that story. They are not problems but are citizens to be welcomed. They ask for dignity without being reduced to a slur. That is the minimum a civilised society owes every person within its borders.Non- racism, the passive state of not actively hating will never be enough to give them that. Only anti-racism will. Passive non-racism is, in practice, a form of permission. It creates the conditions in which active racism thrives, because prejudice does not require universal participation to cause harm. It only requires that enough people stay quiet.Anti- racism demands something more. It demands that a neighbour who overhears a slur says something rather than closing the door. It demands that the bystanders do not treat it as someone else’s problem.And it demands something of the millions who watched that video. Outrage that lasts only as long as the clip is on screen changes nothing. The work of anti-racism lives in what happens after the phone is put down: in the conversation you chose to have, the assumption you choose to challenge, the silence you chose to break. It is not a feeling; it is a practice and must be chosen repeatedly.One of the women in the viral video said it plainly:‘Everyone heard what you said about my image.’Everyone heard, India heard. The question is whether it will act or simply scroll.Tonmoyee Rani Neog is a researcher and writer based in Germany.