What A Murder Tells Us About India's Hypocritical Treatment of Its Northeast

The Wire

10-06-2025

An illustration showing, from left, Sonam Raghuvanshi being brought into a Ghazipur hospital; relatives and friends of Sonam Raghuvanshi in a protest against the Meghalaya government, in Indore, Saturday, June 7, 2025; and the Meghalaya map.
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In Meghalaya, the last few days have been nothing short of a crime drama written consciously against the backdrop of the pristine, 'aesthetically pleasing' hills. A newlywed couple from Indore who arrived in the state for their honeymoon mysteriously went missing. The husband was soon found dead in a crevice in the hills, and a frantic search for the wife continued while calls for a CBI probe were heard. As CCTV footage, witness accounts and social media takes surfaced, one could almost hear suspenseful music in the background. Then the wife, along with three others, was arrested in Uttar Pradesh. She is now the prime accused in the case.
While the possible explanations for the case still remain myriad, what is most appalling is that between the initial disappearance, and the woman's arrest, the case managed to put an entire state – in fact, an entirety of a notably marginalised region of India – on a public and media trial. The clarity facilitated by the woman's arrest has sparked a notable outrage against this unwarranted defamation that is likely to damage the state's tourism industry. This presumptuous hypocrisy of not just the Indian mainlander but also of a major national news portal was called out even during the initial stages of the case by the likes of Meghalaya journalist and Padma Shri awardee Patricia Mukhim, who criticised a Times of India article that had irresponsibly labelled the hills 'crime-prone.' TOI appears to have now edited the online version of the article.
Edward Said, through his theory of Orientalism (1978), suggests that one of the modes of upkeep of a lopsided power dynamic between an oppressor and the oppressed is the synthesis of a romanticised and 'exoticised' image of the oppressed through a process which he calls 'orientalism'. The chief characteristic of orientalism is that it establishes prejudices about and against the oppressed via their cultural representations which are synthesised and presented by the oppressor themselves. This representation determines the power dynamic between the two classes as they engage. While Said's own work revolves around the specific dichotomy of the West and the East, this theory can no doubt be transplanted into this mainland-periphery relationship within India, and its historically lopsided unfolding.
Until his wife's arrest, the public discourse around the Indore man's murder predictably saw the demonisation of Meghalaya, and the Northeast as a whole, as 'non-tourism-friendly', 'unsafe for outsiders', 'crime-prone', ' jungalee ' and 'brainwashed by Christian missionaries'.
These accusations were ironically and arrogantly prefaced by the claim that the region is heavily tourism dependent.
The Northeast has historically been treated as an exotic amalgam of the mystical, the natural and of 'simple-minded and backward' tribes by the mainland. Of course, there has not been any true engagement with the people of these lands – be it from podcasters accusing women from Mayong of turning men into goats, or Bollywood, where films show 'NE' written on the registration plates of vehicles in a film about, and set vaguely, in the Northeast.
It is this exoticisation – now optimised through the powers of social media – that has triggered the idea that the Northeast is, or if not, that it must become a 'tourist destination'. Having lived in Meghalaya for a significant portion of my own life as an 'outsider', I find this idea nothing more than a clandestine attempt towards breaking the spirit of the Meghalayan people and their right to self-determination on economic and political terms. It also quite clearly contradicts the tangible realities of the state.
As prominent literature about the region, such as Sanjoy Hazarika's Strangers of the Mist (2000) suggests, having been significantly starved of the ointment of social, political and economic attention unlike the country's mainland, the Northeast is recovering from the pangs of British imperialist plunder at a much slower pace than the former. This is one of the catalysts of dissent amongst various peoples of the Northeast against the Indian state itself.
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Even without accounting for armed secessionist movements, and within the constitutional fold itself, there are indications that the region craves a more equitable protection of cultural and linguistic rights in face of continuing threats of their erasure, along with demographic changes. In Meghalaya, these include demands for an Inner Line Permit (ILP) system that makes the tracking of entry and egress of non-residents of the state a more transparent (and perhaps complicated) process. There is also a longstanding organised dissent against the Union government's railway extension plans into the state, led by major political organisations such as the Khasi Student's Union (KSU).
Moreover, much of the state's and region's public memory retains the historically proven idea that the reaction of the Indian state to these concerns has generally been that of violence. In recent times, this has been coupled with a significant insecurity regarding the mainland-centric Hindutva agenda of reimagining 'tribality' as an offshoot of Hindutva, to make political inroads into the peripheral state.
Speaking of Meghalaya as a 'tourist hotspot' is in the same ballpark as Donald Trump's declaration about 'wanting to turn Gaza into a luxurious tourist spot', and the frequent mentions of 'tourism' in post-Article 370 Kashmir.
One senses a re-packaged imposition of the mainland's interests over the right of the Northeastern people to make their own political and economic, and therefore cultural, decisions. In fact, the almost neo-colonial characteristic of travel-influencing in the Northeast is palpable in people's phone screens now, as reach-hungry vloggers 'discover the undiscovered' with every other video, no differently from how Columbus 'discovered' America. 'Hidden gems' and 'secret spots' are unveiled and 'tourist spots' are manufactured in the aphotic parts of the region. This is, of course, also facilitated by private tour operators presenting sanitised clips of 'must visit' spots in the region as 'alternatives to international destinations'. Unintended consequences of this are microcosmic shifts from agrarian or natural resource-based economies in these places, to the more unpredictable and 'tourist-dependent' models of income. And of course, there is the mushrooming of 'concrete' structures in and around such spots and the ecological threat they bring.
In a clear attempt to render it toothless, even the Northeasterner's anger becomes exoticised as a product of what the mainland portrays as their 'simplemindedness'. This idea legitimises mainland India's racially prejudiced 'we know what is better for them' attitude. Consequently, the image of the Northeastern people as 'mindlessly violent' and 'wild' tribals has been intricately embedded in the mainland's consciousness. Thus, when any tangible violence against the mainlander unfolds within the northeastern region, such as the case of the Indore man's murder, the quickest assumption is that it was inflicted by the local.
And it must be noted that this is despite the fact that there are no real statistics to back up claims of any patterns of hostilities towards tourists in the state. In fact, as tourism gradually increases in the Northeast, instances of tourists not respecting the land have grown. For instance, in December, 2024, Akash Sagar, a social media influencer with 1.5 million followers on Instagram, uploaded videos of himself provocatively chanting 'Jai Shri Ram', and singing Hindu hymns inside the Church of Epiphany located in Meghalaya's famously 'cleanest Asian village', Mawlynnong. This led to criticism and an FIR. Similarly, in another incident in June, 2025, a local man was physically attacked by a group of intoxicated tourists from Uttar Pradesh. And yet, in these cases, national – and local –reports have had the decency to not speculate such incidents as indicators of stereotypical characteristics of tourists visiting the state.
Meghalaya need not be at the beck and call of its tourism industry for its prosperity. There is no precondition to its existence that compels its people to turn every inch of their homeland into an amusement park for tourists from other states. Whether or not it is, and will be a tourist destination —and to what extent it will—depends significantly on the consent and mandate of its people, and not only on government policy and state highhandedness. It is of the utmost importance that the discourse, and the industry itself, de-centres the mainlander and makes it about the people of the state and their interests.
Ayaan Halder is a poet, author and doctoral research scholar at the Department of Law, Gauhati University, Assam (India). He spent his childhood and teenage years in Meghalaya, and is still closely associated with residents of the state.
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