Across India’s cities and conflict zones, racialized and gendered violence exposes a deeper political problem: the uneven distribution of protection. When the state fails to recognize this pattern, certain citizens are left to inhabit what might be called the politics of the unprotected body.
A nation reveals itself not in the grandeur of its Constitution but in the moment of contempt when one citizen decides another may be humiliated, assaulted, or killed. It reveals itself in the quarrel between neighbours and in the police complaint that records the injury but refuses the motive. Most strikingly, it reveals itself in the confidence with which some men ask certain women: tu kya kar legi? – what will you do?
In recent weeks, videos circulated widely from New Delhi’s Malviya Nagar in which three young women from Arunachal Pradesh were verbally abused by their neighbours. What appeared at first as a quarrel revealed something larger: these incidents of racialized gender violence expose social hierarchies that determine who is allowed dignity and who must defend it.
The mockery in the video quickly became sexual insults – “Dhandewali” (prostitute), “Massage Wali” – exposing the racialized logic through which women from Northeast India are read: foreign, sexualized, and disposable.
The question became unavoidable: what kind of society repeatedly produces such acts of violence?
The state responded after the violence occurred: arrests were made, legal provisions invoked, procedures followed. But have we ever wondered about the afterlife of such violence?
I began to shrink in the city, losing tenderness with each act of racialized violence. With every assault, I was convinced protection was not guaranteed.
So what kind of society produces such violence?
The answer lies in the refusal to confront what these incidents represent. They remind us that for certain citizens, particularly women from Northeast India, belonging remains contested in both private and public life. The recurring humiliation emerges from a social order in which some bodies move through the republic without the assurance of protection.
This condition is what I call the politics of the unprotected body.
The political philosopher Hannah Arendt once described the most fundamental human entitlement as the “right to have rights.” Rights exist in constitutions and legal codes, but they become meaningful only when institutions recognize someone as fully belonging to the political community whose protection those rights presume. When institutions hesitate, that right quietly collapses.
The violence against women in Manipur’s ongoing conflict revealed precisely such a collapse: Kuki women were stripped and paraded naked by a mob, their humiliation recorded and circulated in one of the most disturbing images of contemporary India. These women were citizens of the republic. Yet the machinery meant to protect them – police, administration, and the state itself did not function as it should have. Their citizenship remained intact only on paper.
A similar collapse appeared in 2014 when a woman from the Northeast who filed a molestation complaint against a lawyer was assaulted by advocates inside the Tis Hazari court complex in Delhi. The incident was disturbing not only because of the assault but because of where it occurred: within a space meant to represent the authority of law. The victim entered the justice system and encountered intimidation within it.
Arendt’s insight reminds us that the most dangerous political condition is not always the absence of law. It is the moment when the law ceases to operate for particular bodies.
The anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon offers another lens through which to understand this vulnerability. Fanon argued that in societies structured by racial hierarchies, the body of the marginalized person becomes burdened with meanings that precede the individual who inhabits it. A person is no longer encountered as a person; the body becomes a symbol onto which prejudices are projected.
Our bodies are read through assumptions: treated as culturally alien. Across everyday life, the racial slur and sexual insinuation arrive together. The body itself becomes the terrain on which belonging is negotiated and denied.
To understand why such incidents recur, the work of Achille Mbembe becomes illuminating. Mbembe argues that modern power often operates through the unequal distribution of protection. Some populations live close to the state’s concern; while others remain closer to abandonment. The crucial political question therefore becomes: whose life is treated as urgently protectable?
Violence, whether committed by an individual or a mob, is also the outcome of unequal protection. This is precisely the politics of the unprotected body.
India possesses no shortage of evidence. The killing of Arunachal student Nido Tania in Lajpat Nagar in 2014 should have settled the question of racialized violence against people from the Northeast. In response, the Government of India established the Bezbaruah Committee, documenting the racism faced by people from the region and recommending legal reforms. Yet more than a decade later, the law remains structurally hesitant.
Courts have acknowledged the problem but deferred legislative action to Parliament. Meanwhile, law enforcement frequently processes such cases under general criminal provisions such as – assault, intimidation, insulting modesty, while racial and gendered motivations disappear in the bureaucratic language of the First Information Report.
The result is a triangle of institutional failure: policy acknowledgment, judicial limitation, and bureaucratic dilution.
Together they produce the structural invisibility of racial violence.
The irony is stark. India is a signatory to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, committing to combat racial prejudice. Yet, Race remains an uneasy truth in the Indian legal imagination.
To grasp the national significance of this pattern, one may turn to Karl Jaspers. After the Second World War, Jaspers asked whether a society can inherit responsibility for crimes committed in its name. His answer challenged the belief that guilt belongs only to individual perpetrators. He urged that a nation must confront the structures and prejudices that make such violence imaginable. India now faces that question.
When racial humiliation becomes routine, when women’s bodies become instruments of public domination, and when the law repeatedly fails to recognize the structure behind the violence, responsibility extends beyond the immediate perpetrator. It touches institutions, politics, and the moral imagination of the nation itself.
I write these words from Germany, having left India but not escaped its questions. Distance does not soften the urgency of these concerns; if anything, it clarifies the contradiction between the country’s constitutional ideals and the everyday vulnerability experienced by many of its citizens.
The demand must now be stated plainly. India must establish a law that recognizes and prosecutes racial hate crimes, including racialized and gendered violence against people from Northeast India. Parliament must act where hesitation has prevailed, and constitutional equality must exist in practice, not merely on paper.
This is a demand for constitutional seriousness, not a request for sympathy.
No democracy should have to wait for another viral video or another death to recognize the violence it already understands. The republic knows the problem. What remains is the work of the law.
Until that work is done, the promise of equal citizenship will remain incomplete and the bodies most exposed to violence will continue to testify to that failure.
-Ngurang Reena,
Writer & researcher based in Germany.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Girl Up
