India Must Enact an Anti-Racial Discrimination Law—Now, Not Later

By Sanjeev Sirohi

India’s failure to enact a comprehensive anti-racial discrimination law has become indefensible. Decades after Independence—and more than 60 years after signing the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965)—the country still lacks a specific legal framework to address racism. This vacuum has had deadly consequences, particularly for citizens from the North-Eastern states, whose lives continue to be scarred or cut short by racial prejudice.

The recent killing of 24-year-old MBA student Anjel Chakma in Dehradun is the latest and most searing reminder. On December 9, 2025, Chakma—originally from Tripura—was allegedly stabbed after objecting to racial slurs hurled at him and his brother at a canteen. He succumbed to his injuries on December 27. His reported last words—“We are not Chinese…we are Indians. What certificate should we show?”—are an indictment of the Republic itself. When an Indian citizen must assert nationality as a defence against violence, equality before law stands gravely compromised.

The National Human Rights Commission has sought reports from the Uttarakhand government, the DGP, and the Chief Secretary. Political leaders across states have expressed condolences and promised action. Yet expressions of outrage, however sincere, cannot substitute for structural reform. Chakma’s death joins a grim list that includes Nido Taniam, Loitam Richard, Reingamphy Awungshi, Akha Salouni, and others—young lives lost to racial hatred with alarming regularity.

India’s legal system already recognises hate crimes against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes through the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, enacted in 1989. If the law can acknowledge and address caste-based violence, why has racial discrimination remained legally invisible? Civil society organisations and human rights lawyers have demanded an anti-racism law for over three decades. Their pleas have been met with apathy.

The absence of a dedicated statute has real, damaging consequences. Victims who approach the police are often told there is no specific remedy. As author and activist Angellica Aribam, founder of the Femme First Foundation, wrote in The Indian Express (December 31, 2025), she herself faced racist abuse—especially during the Covid-19 period, when people from the Northeast were derided as “Chinese” or “Corona” and denied basic services. When she sought police help, officers reportedly expressed helplessness due to the lack of an anti-racism law. This institutional paralysis allows prejudice to escalate from verbal abuse to physical violence.

It is not as if the State has never acknowledged the problem. After the murder of Nido Taniam in Delhi in 2014, the UPA government constituted the Bezbaruah Committee to recommend measures to curb racism against people from the Northeast. But with the change of government later that year, the report’s recommendations largely gathered dust. A decade later, the problem has only worsened.

Against this bleak backdrop, a ray of hope has emerged. On December 28, 2025, advocate Anoop Prakash Awasthi filed a Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court, seeking urgent judicial intervention to address what he describes as a continuing constitutional failure to prevent racial discrimination and violence. The petition argues that the routine humiliation of North-Eastern citizens—being called “Chinese” or “Chinky”—reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of India’s constitutional vision. Awasthi poignantly submits that it is a failure of governance if a citizen has to assert nationality to survive.

The petition underscores that Chakma’s last words are not merely personal anguish but a constitutional warning. Citizenship, it argues, flows from the Constitution, not from ethnic appearance or public perception. When society demands “certificates” of Indianness from racially distinct citizens, the Republic betrays its own foundations.

India can no longer afford delay. An Anti-Racial Discrimination Law must clearly define racial abuse and violence, provide strong penal consequences, mandate police accountability, and establish swift grievance-redress mechanisms. Deterrent punishment is essential, but so is prevention. Educational curricula in schools and colleges must include robust chapters on equality, diversity, and the unacceptability of racism in any form.

Only then will slogans like “Ek Bharat, Shreshtha Bharat” acquire real meaning. Protection from violence is not a privilege; it is a basic constitutional guarantee owed to every citizen—whether from the Northeast, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, or anywhere else in India. The time for half-measures and hollow assurances is over. India must act—now.