I saw the news about C. Vikram Singh on Tuesday (September 8) morning, and I actually put my phone away for a second. A fifty-four-year-old musician from Manipur lived in Delhi for years and all he did that night was ask some drunk men outside his window to keep the noise down. They beat him for it. His son carried him to the hospital but he succumbed to the beating. I sat with the news for a while before I could make myself keep reading. And here is the part that makes me terribly sad. I have read this sentence before. May not be this exact sentence but its twin, its cousin, its echo over and over for more than a decade now. Maybe with a different name in different locality but the same pattern and the same ending. I am not ashamed to say that I am tired and exhausted. Tired in a specific way you get when you watch the same tragedy wear a new face every few months and nothing underneath it ever seems to move. Exhausted because grief this repetitive stops feeling like grief and starts feeling like a pattern. Patterns are supposed to be something a society learns from. This one, we don’t seem to. So, forgive me the questions, because I don’t know how else to ask it anymore. Is a face, the shape of a person’s eyes, the sound of their name, the place of their birth- still a reason to die in this country? Why does the presence of a Northeastern face so often invite contempt in public space? Why does it still seem possible for some people to believe that a Northeast body is less protected, less respected, more disposable? These are deeply rooted habits of racial thinking. We may not always use the language of race in India but the behaviour, the hierarchy and the treatment are there. The death of Vikram Singh is another brutal reminder that racism in India is lived and can be humiliating and fatal. Also read: ‘I Have No Hope in this Govt’: The Lynching of Chongtham Vikram Singh and India’s Growing Taste For Mob ViolenceVery often the Northeast is looked at as if something outside the national map of India. That is the first violence. The second is the way that the violence becomes normal. A woman from the Northeast is stared at, a man is mocked for his face, food or clothes or language. Students are called names in the hostels; workers are told they do not belong. People from the Northeast grow up carrying a double burden: they must live in India and then prove that they are Indian and this citizenship test never ends. Racism against Northeastern people remains so deeply embedded in daily life that people do not even recognise it as racism. They term it as teasing, misunderstanding or bad behaviour. But for those who live with it, it is fear, insult, erosion and in some cases as this death shows, it is a violence that ends a life. I think we have gotten too used to encountering these stories one at a time as if each is its own freak accident. It appears in classrooms, in workplaces, in housing, in public spaces, in the casual language people use. It appears in the assumption that people from the Northeast are not quite part of the national family, not quite entitled to the same safety and respect that others take for granted. This kind of exclusion is a form of racialised thinking that has been allowed to survive because India is still unwilling to speak honestly about racism within its own borders. The idea that the racism is a distant problem for India and this self-deception has cost people lives and dignity for years. More often, racism comes disguised as a laugh, a comment, a slur, a refusal, a boundary crossed and then denied. These acts may seem small to those who commit them, but to those who endure them , they accumulate into a daily education in humiliation. They teach that belonging in India is not equal. What gets me most is that it isn’t as though nothing has been tried to address the issue. There has been, technically, a decade of ‘measures.’ After Nido Tania’s death, the Bezbaruah Committee was actually set up by the Union government to study the problem and recommend fixes. It proposed fast track courts for crimes against people from the Northeast, sensitisation training for police and a dedicated law criminalising racial discrimination. A private member’s Bill along these lines was even introduced in the parliament. It never became a law though. We got the anti-slur provision in 2011. We got task forces, helplines etc. and in between all these we got Anjel Chakma, we got Vikram Singh. We got, in the years between the headlines, the thousand humiliations that never make the news at all. We got the landlord who won’t rent to you because your face looks ‘different’, the taxi driver who assumes you are a foreigner and the classmate who thinks ‘chinky’ is a nickname. So, do we need a law?I think we do, though I want to be honest that a law alone won’t fix what is, underneath everything, a failure of empathy that no legislation can fully legislate away. But a dedicated anti-racism law would name the thing. It would at least do something specific that the current patchwork doesn’t. A legal recognition of the specific harm is a rational response to a long and documented failure. A law cannot erase prejudices overnight but would create a basis for complaints, penalties, protection and accountability. It would make the public aware that racial abuse towards the people from the Northeast is a violation. Will people push back? Of course. Many will say that India already has enough laws and the problem is enforcement not legislation. But if the current laws were enough, why does this keep happening, in exactly the same pattern, to the people who did nothing but exist in a body that looked unfamiliar to the mainland Indians? Enforcement of a general law is always going to be weaker than enforcement of one built specifically to see this kind of hatred for what it is. Of course, laws are only one part of the answer. The deeper battle is cultural. India must confront the way the Northeast people are routinely made to feel foreign in their own country. The region has been spoken about rather than listened to. Its people have been admired for their clothes and music while still being denied belonging. And this is consumption.Also read: ‘No Centralised Data on Racial Slurs, Discrimination Against People From Northeast’: GovtThe Northeast is welcomed as an image – colourful, musical, attractive and different. But its people are not always accepted as citizens with their own histories, traumas, wounds and equal claim to public life. The Northeast is exotic for the mainland India. This exotisation turns living communities into things to be looked at, enjoyed and then kept at a distance. It allows the majority to admire the surface and refuse to confront the prejudices beneath it. To be consumed as culture and rejected as a citizen is another form of exclusion.People participate in a candlelight vigil at the Western Gate of Kangla condemning the killing of Manipuri musician Chongtham Vikram Singh in New Delhi, in Imphal, Manipur on September 8. Photo: PTI.Vikram Singh’s death should disturb the conscience of this country. A country cannot call itself diverse and democratic when a section of its citizens must constantly negotiate suspicion. There is another particular pain in the expectation that the people from the Northeast have to keep educating everyone around why a slur hurts or why a stereotype is violent. This is another burden placed on the victims.What is required now is recognition backed by action. That is why the country needs to adopt a clear anti racism framework with legal force. Workplace safeguards, housing protections, public awareness campaigns all these matter only if there is a serious law behind them. Without that, racism remains easy to deny and easy to repeat. With the particular law, there will be a line and a penalty for crossing it. And that line matters, because people who have lived too long with casual dehumanisation, the difference between being ignored and being protected can be the difference between fear and dignity and between life and death.If India is serious about racism, it should stop treating racism against the Northeast people as a side issue. Expecting more patience from those who have already shown more than fairness allows is pathetic. What is needed is prevention, recognition and punishment where necessary. It needs a law that says plainly that racial contempt is not a private quirk but a heinous crime against the social fabric. A face should never be a reason to die in this country. But until that truth is taken seriously in law and in life, people from the Northeast will continue to live with the fear that safety is conditional, belonging is unequal and dignity can be withdrawn at any moment. Isn’t this a national disgrace?Tonmoyee Rani Neog is a researcher and writer based in Wolfsburg, Germany.