It was a hot, sultry, summer day in 2000. The memory of that day is still firmly implanted in my mind's eye (not because I have a photographic memory but because I wrote it down in my diary).
2000-it was the year I first came to Delhi. I was standing in front of SGTB Khalsa College in North Campus waiting for my friend there. A smart lady probably in her early thirties approached me and asked, "Do you know any PCOs near this place?" (In those days mobile phones were not as common as they were today).
"I'm sorry I don't know", came my reply.
"It's okay. By the way which country are you from?" she asked as she was leaving, curiosity getting the better of her.
"I'm from India, from the northeastern state of Manipur" came my quick reply, slightly annoyed yet amused that she mistook me for a foreigner.
I wasn't prepared for what was coming my way next. She said, "Is Manipur a part of India?".
I was getting really annoyed by now. So I retorted back in anger, "Manipur is very much a part of India, it is on the border with Myanmar."
After she left me, several thoughts came to my mind. This lady spoke impeccable English, and from her looks was probably from an upper class family and she doesn't even know that Manipur is a part of India. And she mistook me for a foreigner because I didn't "look Indian". (If ever there was an "Indian look", and if people from a particular country were supposed to have certain physical features). Anyways, I thought, maybe Geography was never her forte at school (that's how I comforted myself).
This is not a one-off or isolated incident. Most people from Northeast must have had experience of a similar nature at some point of their lives. This incident highlighted the fact that Northeast India remains a neglected region and not seen by many as a part of mainstream India. Who is to blame for this? Both the government and the press are equally to blame for this. Offical apathy and neglect has resulted in underdevelopment, large-scale unemployment and stunted growth of the region. This has led to growing resentment and frustration towards the powers that be which often finds manifestation in drug abuse and insurgency - the two main problems facing the Northeastern youths.
The mainstream media, in most cases, fail to report on news and issues concerning the Northeast region and on the few occasions when they do cover northeast issues, the news reports are often inacurate and distorted. Morever they never make it to the front page of any mainstream newspaper and were hidden away in some dingy corner of the papers. This hostile attitude towards the Northeast is also evident in the school curricula. The history of the Northeast has hardly found space in the school curricula and the geography of the region never given much importance. This attitude is best summed up by Rahul Bedi's (of Jane's Defence Weekly) words "Kashmir is a lot more sexier than the Northeast". The problems facing this region was never given much space in the media. Should we remain a silent spectator to all these? Is there something we can do about this? Isn't it time that we shed our narrow mindsets and parochialism and work towards our common interests. What do we gain by always pulling down each other?
