Mindset Must Change on Northeast

The gap of information and understanding between the Northeast and the mainland will never be bridged until mainlanders consider this picturesque region an equally important part of the country. A majority of Indians have still not embraced the people from the Northeastern states as their own. As a result, Northeasterners more often than not encounter numerous problems whenever they venture out of the region, where racial abuse remains a major concern. Even more concerning is the fact that a number of complaints against such attacks have failed to deliver justice. Today, the people of the Northeast have been forced to accept it as a part of their lives whenever they go to other places in the country. Even after more than seven and a half decades of Independence, mainlanders are still unaware and ignorant about the Northeast. The unique culture of the region often goes unnoticed. Although the region has made considerable progress in every sphere of life, its success story has virtually no takers in the mainland. For them, the region is still like a forbidden land, and the people living there are not qualified to join the mainstream.

This typical mindset regarding the Northeast came to light in the recent ‘honeymoon murder’ in Meghalaya, where a newly-wed bride hatched a plan to kill her husband in collaboration with her lover and associates. Since the couple went missing, their families and friends started blaming the inefficiencies of the local police in unison for their failure to locate them. Even after the groom’s body was found in a deep trench not far from the international border, they started alleging that miscreants had taken the bride to Bangladesh. Showing utter disrespect to the Meghalaya police, they even demanded that the probe should be handed over to the CBI. But kudos to the Meghalaya police for cracking this case by showing excellent investigative skills, arresting the culprits from places in central and north India, located thousands of miles away from the state. The efficiency shown by the state police virtually forced the bride to surrender, with the hope that her concocted story of kidnapping and robbery would help to hoodwink the police once again. But failing to mislead the police, she is now languishing in jail.

If the friends and relatives of both the deceased and the culprit had had a little knowledge about the region, they would have sensed that something had gone seriously wrong from their end, as the Northeast is the safest region for women in the country, where cases of rape and molestation rarely occur. Secondly, the people of the Northeast would never harm their guests under any circumstances, as that goes against their culture. Instead, both families started spreading malice against the region. Lastly, the police forces in the Northeast are in no way inferior to the police forces of the mainland. More pathetic is that even after cracking the murder case creditably, the police are still in the dock, as the bride’s parents are alleging that their daughter has been falsely framed, instead of feeling ashamed for being the parents of a daughter who planned the murder of her husband.