The video from Manipur that went viral recently — most people have some idea of it by now. News channels are sharing it, everyone is offering their point of view. But my discomfort sits somewhere else, on a much smaller and more uncomfortable point: how much do we actually know about our own country?
People say the government doesn't take interest in the North East. That may well be true. But here is what we conveniently forget — the government's interest, or lack of it, should not be the deciding factor for the rest of us. As long as we ourselves stay disengaged from the North East, the government has little reason to engage either. Attention follows attention. When citizens look away, so does power.
We don't even know the names
This is not an exaggeration. There are still plenty of people who cannot name all the states of the North East. Forget the capitals — they don't know the states themselves. I have heard people confidently give Mizoram as the capital of Nagaland. These are facts taught in primary school, in every school, and yet so many of us have let them slip away as though that part of the map belongs to someone else.
That casual ignorance has a cost. It quietly tells our fellow citizens in the North East that they are an afterthought.
The violence isn't new
The video that surfaced came nearly 77 days after the events it shows. I don't know the full reason for that delay — the zero FIR was reportedly registered days after the incident, so the lag is hard to explain. But the larger truth is this: the violence you are seeing in Manipur now is not a sudden, fresh thing. It has been building for years. Much of what has happened there simply isn't captured by mainstream media. There are very few journalists, very few reporters, who actually want to carry North East India's stories to the ministry, to the media, to the rest of us.
Racism inside our own country
My request to my fellow Indians is plain. Practising racism within your own country is a deeply wrong thing. Stop asking people from the North East whether they "eat dogs." Stop treating their features, their food, their states as foreign and strange. You should know what is happening in your own home before you judge the people living in another room of it.
The North East is not a separate part of India. We are all residents of the same country. And if we are one country, then we have to ask ourselves an honest question — how can we make another person's life a little better, rather than a little smaller?
Start with the small step
The first step is almost embarrassingly basic. Learn the place. Learn the states, learn their capitals, learn something about the people who live there. It is the kind of thing taught to children, and most of us still don't know it. But real change is built from small steps. We only reach the bigger levels — empathy, accountability, genuine unity — by first covering the small ground we skipped.
So the most important shift isn't out there in the government or the media. It is inside your own mind: the simple, firm acknowledgement that North East India is part of our country too. The day we start taking interest, the government and the media may finally find a reason to take interest as well.