Itanagar: The recent incident where a YouTuber made racist remarks about the North East and its people sparked a fresh conversation about years of racism faced by the North Eastern people from the rest of the country.
On Friday several students’ unions created a Twitter storm urging for NCERT textbooks to include “history, ethnicity, culture, lifestyle, personalities, natural resources and patriotism” of the northeastern states.
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Late last month, Paras Singh, who goes by the name Paras Official on his YouTube channel in a video said that the Congress MLA Ninong Ering a non-Indian and apparently claimed that Arunachal Pradesh was a part of China which caused a huge outrage from Arunachalees and people from other parts of the country.
This sparked a huge outrage from the northeastern communities as there is a long-standing history of racial abuse faced by people from the North East, sometimes these would even amount to violent attacks. In 2014, Nido Tania was beaten in broad daylight by a group of people in Delhi's Lajpat Nagar during which they shouted racial slurs at him. Tania passed away due to brain and lung injuries he had sustained from the attack, this was one of the most extreme cases that have occurred in the recent past.
In 2017, Ering had introduced a Private Member Bill ‘The Compulsory teaching of North-East culture in Educational Institutions’ in the Parliament, but it was not taken up.
Shashi Tharoor too joined in voice about the importance of a chapter about the north east, he tweeted, "It's essential that a chapter on the NorthEast is included in the NCERT syllabus. We must know our own country better."