New Delhi: Kilokri is your usual bustling locality in Southeast Delhi. Previously existing as an address, the locality now finds itself busy with reporters, camerapersons, Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) cadre and several gazes aimed at a particular building.Late on September 6, Chongtham Vikram Singh stepped out of his third-floor apartment of this building in Kilokri. Outside, a group of men were drinking and causing loud disturbance.Singh, a 55-year-old guitarist and music teacher from Manipur, objected. What began as a dispute downstairs ended with his death.According to Delhi Police’s statement, Singh was assaulted after confronting the group. As he tried to return home, the men allegedly chased him into his building and up the stairs, where he was beaten outside the apartment where his wife and son were waiting. By morning, Singh was dead.Seven individuals have been arrested and a juvenile apprehended in connection with the killing. But almost immediately, his death came to represent something beyond the sequence of events now being investigated by the Delhi Police.A life built around music in Delhi over two decadesFor nearly two decades, Singh had built a life around music in Delhi. That life was rooted in Kilokari, a densely packed neighbourhood near Ashram where small businesses and eateries sit alongside apartment buildings. But today, his death has shocked many, especially those northeastern people who pack their whole lives in suitcases only to call Delhi their home.For many from India’s Northeast living in the capital, the killing of a Manipuri man outside his own home revived a familiar fear; that even after decades of making lives in Delhi, belonging here remains conditional.“Nothing like this has ever happened here. I have been living here for 50 years, that’s all my life, I raised my children here, and have seen the area growingly accommodate people from the northeast here. Not just as tenants but as shop owners, business owners, wholly integrated into Kilokri” says Govind, an auto-driver living in the area. Another local, Ramesh, who owns a small spare parts shop in the area was very disturbed by the killing.Chongtham Vikram Singh was a veteran guitarist and music teacher. Photo: Instagram/@nickychandam“It spoils the atmosphere. Such things don’t happen here and we have never even seen northeast people fighting or creating a scene. They are friendly and usually kind to everyone” he said.But there is something particularly unsettling about the geography of Singh’s death. He was not attacked in an unfamiliar part of the city. According to accounts that have emerged so far, he was chased back into the building where he lived and beaten steps from his own home. Delhi had been home for nearly two decades.It was there that he died.‘We know that we are Indian, they don’t think that way’Singh’s killing has also struck a particularly raw nerve among Manipuris at a time when home itself remains uncertain. Since ethnic violence erupted in Manipur in May 2023, hundreds have been killed and tens of thousands displaced. The conflict has torn communities apart and hardened geographical divisions, leaving many who live outside the state watching events unfold through frantic phone calls, photographs and messages from family.Kim, a Manipuri resident of Kilokri says “We have complained to the Police several times about our safety. The way certain people look at us, call us racist words, even words like Chinese, Nepali. We know that we are Indian, they don’t think that way. We need more CCTVs, patrolling units. Even phone snatchers roam here. This death has disturbed every Northeastern resident of Kilokri”.The Wire also met two Manipuri students who had shifted to Kilokri only two months ago.“Our parents were worried, they called us and asked us to not attract unnecessary attention not quarrel with people and just quietly mind our business,” they said.For Manipuris, the conflict travels with them and their identity when news of another killing surfaces. Singh’s death introduced a cruel contradiction. For those who cannot find peace in a Manipur still marred by conflict, Delhi too has long carried its own anxieties. Just as Singh’s identity became clear, the question of racism also followed.Across social media and among organisations representing people from the Northeast too, Singh’s killing was seen through a longer history of racial discrimination and violence faced by Northeastern people in Delhi and across India. Police, however, are still investigating additional motive behind the assault. Whether investigators find evidence that Singh was specifically targeted because he was Manipuri remains an open question.But for Delhi’s many Northeastern residents, racism has become a part of mundane humiliations of daily life, even while hunting for housing or work. Most of these experiences pinch them but never become police cases. But for a Northeastern person, over time it became a parameter for them to understand a killing like Singh’s. Delhi has witnessed this worry before.In 2014, the death of Nido Taniam, a student from Arunachal Pradesh who was assaulted and died of severe lung and brain injuries inflicted during the attack, sparked national outrage and forced a wider conversation about racism against people from the Northeast. The government appointed the Bezbaruah Committee, which recommended legal and institutional measures to address racial discrimination and violence.‘Why are we made to look out for ourselves?’Before he became a photograph accompanying demands for justice, Singh was a musician, a teacher, a husband, a father and a son.“People with our looks, our culture, our food choices are nowhere safe in India. Each time a person from the Northeast dies at the hands of mainland people. People start asking – was this a hate crime? Was this a racist attack – which gets translated to me as – ‘why did you get killed’. It is time to ask perpetrators about why do they attack Northeastern students. See the police records, how many cases get registered and how many cases of racism against us actually lead to action. It is the Delhi Police, BJP government needs to face these questions, not us,” Nicky Chandam, an artist close to the Chongtham family told The Wire from Imphal.“Imagine, there is a helpline for Northeast people, it is 1093. Do Rajasthani, Gujarati people have distress helplines? Why are we made to look out for ourselves? Every time a Northeastern person is assaulted and murdered by a mad mob why are we asked to stay careful? I have no hope in this government” Chandam added.Today, Singh’s killing has already raised a larger question that extends beyond the arrests and the chargesheet. For people from the Northeast who have spent years negotiating their place in Delhi, his death has revived an old anxiety: that the city can make a home feel provisional and for Manipuris, that fear carries a particular cruelty. With their home still fractured by a conflict that has displaced thousands and divided communities; away from it, many have built new lives in cities like Delhi – only to find that distance does not always bring safety, freedo or belonging.Mob lynchings are becoming the violent realityDelhi today, reflects the larger sentiment that India is scarily beginning to normalise. Mob lynchings are becoming the violent reality of the country. An act that begun gaining momentum in 2014 quickly instilled in angry jingoists with a sense of entitlement and the right to police anyone in their way.Months after prime minister Modi assumed office in May 2014, reports of attacks on religious minorities began to climb. In June 2014, Mohsin Shaikh, a young Muslim IT worker in Pune, was beaten to death by Hindu extremists – the first of several lynchings that followed. A year later, in 2015, a Hindu mob in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, killed Mohammad Akhlaq on suspicion of eating beef. By 2016-17, assaults on Muslims accused of trading or transporting cattle spread across northern India, with cases like the lynching of dairy farmer Pehlu Khan in Rajasthan. Christians and Dalits , too, came under pressure during this period: nationalist groups staged forced reconversion campaigns, disrupted prayer meetings, vandalised churches and invoked new anti-conversion laws to arrest pastors and worshippers. The period also saw Taniam’s killing as mentioned above. Singh was silenced by the same mob mentality as well. On the night he died, he stepped outside his home to complain about a disturbance. He did not return.While Singh’s family maintains that they do not want revenge but want justice, but for a community still watching Manipur’s wounds from afar, his death has made one thing painfully clear, that India’s shift towards accepting mob lynching as a preferred tool to silence the ‘other’ is complete.