So why did they MURDER YOUNG ANGEL CHAKMA?

Picture couresy youthinner voice/Insgtagram/Social Media

Angel Chakma was not so brutally murdered, merely by a knife; he was eliminated by a social climate in which hate has been legitimised.

By Suresh Nautiyal Greenananda

As a citizen of India, I feel extremely disturbed.

The killing of a young Northeastern-Indian, Angel Chakma, in Dehradun, leaves me with a profound sense of grief and shame—not only as a citizen of the Earth, but as someone from Uttarakhand.

This was not a routine crime, nor merely an act of individual brutality. It was a case of absolute moral and civic failure, one that exposes the fragility of India’s claim to be an inclusive, democratic nation-state.

Angel Chakma’s death compels us to confront questions that India has long evaded: Who belongs to the nation? What constitutes citizenship? And how far does the state go in protecting those who do not fit the dominant image of the Indian? 

When a republic fails to protect some of its citizens from racialised or ethnic or mob violence, it does not merely fail administratively—it fails ideologically, ethically, and morally.

As Hannah Arendt observed, citizenship is ultimately about “the right to have rights”. When that right becomes uncertain, democracy loses its moral foundation.

Citizenship as Faith

Angel Chakma was 24 years old. Like thousands of students from the Northeast, he came to Dehradun to pursue higher education and build a professional life. His journey was an act of trust in the Indian republic—a belief that education, dignity, and opportunity are available to all citizens, irrespective of ethnicity or appearance.

He was the son of a Border Security Force jawan—a family that had served the Indian State and guarded its territorial sovereignty. His presence in Dehradun was not incidental; it was the consequence of faith in India as a shared civic space.

That faith was brutally betrayed.

The Moment Belonging Was Revoked

On the cold evening of December 9, 2026, Angel and his younger brother Michael went out to buy groceries in the Selaqui area. According to eyewitness accounts and the family’s complaint, they were subjected to racial slurs—“Chinese,” “Chinki,” “Momo”—terms that Northeastern Indians have been forced to endure in some parts of India, including in Delhi, for decades.

These words are not casual insults. They perform a political function: They strip the victim of ‘belonging’. They declare, without argument or evidence, that the person addressed is a foreigner in his own country.

Angel resisted this erasure. He asserted his Indian identity with calm and clarity. That assertion triggered violence.

He was stabbed and beaten with extraordinary brutality, suffering severe injuries to his head and spine. His brother was injured while trying to save him.

Angel collapsed on the street. The Indian promise of equal citizenship collapsed with him.

Delay as Denial

Angel remained on life support for 17 days. During this period, the institutional response revealed a disturbing lack of urgency. An FIR was registered three days after the attack and initially treated as a case of assault rather than attempted murder.

The state government is led by the BJP, and under this regime, the peaceful and secular atmosphere has been visibly vitiated. The poison of polarisation and hate politics has become so entrenched, that Uttarkhand, called Devbhoomi, is now often being termed as a Hindutva hate lab, like Gujarat since 2002.

For instance, it is routine when attacks on Kashmiri shawl sellers and traders is quickly followed after a terrorist attack elsewhere – as after the Pahalgam killings of tourists. Pray, what have these hard working inheritors of a brilliant traditional craft got to do with terrorists?

In a democracy, delay is not neutral. It reflects power relations. It reveals whose lives are considered urgent and whose suffering is negotiable. As civil society groups raised concerns, it became evident that the racial dimension of the crime was being downplayed, if not actively denied.

On December 26, Angel Chakma died. Only then was the case formally registered as murder, perhaps reluctantly.

The State and the Language of Excuse

Police arrested five accused, including two minors. One key accused reportedly fled. Yet the damage deepened when senior police officials publicly suggested that the racial remarks were made “in jest” and that the incident might not qualify as a hate crime.

Such statements are not administrative errors; they are ideological positions. They normalise racism by trivialising it. They deny the social reality that casual racial abuse is often the precursor to physical violence.

Angel’s father rejected this narrative, pointing to delays and institutional insensitivity. At this stage, the case ceased to be only about criminal prosecution. It became a test of whether the Indian State recognises racism as a threat to citizenship itself.

Protests and the Fracture of Trust

Protests erupted across the Northeast. Candlelight marches, student demonstrations, and public statements demanded justice. More fundamentally, they demanded recognition—that racist violence against Northeastern Indians is not episodic, but systemic.

India’s constitutional promise of equality rings hollow when entire communities must repeatedly prove their Indianness. Political theorist Étienne Balibar reminds us that citizenship is not merely legal status; it is a lived experience of equality. When that experience is absent, citizenship becomes formal and democracy becomes procedural.

When Citizenship Feels Conditional

As outrage spread, a deeper anxiety surfaced in parts of the Northeast, which already feels alienated: If the Indian State cannot protect us, what does citizenship actually mean, and then why cannot we get a separate nation?

In some forums, voices began expressing the idea of separation—not as organised secession, but as a cry of alienation. These expressions must not be dismissed lightly. They are symptoms of a broken moral contract between the state and its citizens.

A nation-state survives not merely by force, but by consent. When citizens begin to feel permanently unsafe and unrecognised, the legitimacy of the nation itself erodes.

The Nation-State and the Politics of Appearance

A modern nation-state is defined not by homogeneity, but by equal protection under law. As Dr BR Ambedkar warned, political democracy cannot survive without social equality.

Angel Chakma’s murder exposes a dangerous drift in Indian society: The conflation of appearance with allegiance. “Foreign-looking” has become an unspoken category of suspicion.

This is a fundamental betrayal of India’s civilisational reality. India has never been racially uniform. Its people belong to multiple ethnic lineages—Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic, Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, and many others. This diversity extends beyond the Northeast to Ladakh, Sikkim, Darjeeling, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and West Bengal. If facial features become a test of loyalty, the logic collapses into absurdity. Border communities become suspect by default. Citizenship is reduced to phenotype.

Nationality, however, is not biological. It is constitutional. Citizenship is not inherited through faces, but guaranteed by law.

Law and order, or Lynch Rule?

Even if someone is suspected of wrongdoing, the response in a constitutional democracy must be law, not vigilantism. To justify killing on the basis of perceived foreignness is to abandon constitutional morality altogether.

Even if Angel Chakma had been a foreign national—even if he had been Chinese—the act of killing would remain indefensible. Civilised societies do not measure the worth of human life by passports and facial features, and India’s civilisational ethos has never done so.

Rooted in the philosophy of Vasudhaiva-Kutumbakam—the world as one family—India has historically recognised the dignity of the stranger, the guest, and the outsider. Foreigners were not enemies by default; they were travellers, seekers, traders, guests, to be protected rather than persecuted.

To assault or kill a person merely because they are perceived as foreign is not nationalism; it is a betrayal of India’s deepest moral traditions. If even a foreigner is entitled to safety, dignity, and due process, how much graver is the crime when an Indian citizen is denied these rights?

Rabindranath Tagore warned that nationalism detached from humanity becomes destructive, turning fear into virtue and violence into patriotism.

Angel Chakma’s killing, therefore, violates not only constitutional law but also the ethical foundations of the civilisation that India claims to represent. It is symbolic of a rotting society, and ruling institutions that are morally decaying rapidly. It reflects the death of humanity.

Deeper Conspiracy

Behind the violence that claimed Angel Chakma’s life lies a deeper and more dangerous current: The politics of cultural hatred normalised over years by the ideological ecosystem of the RSS.

This politics does not always manifest as direct instruction to kill; it works more insidiously, by repeatedly defining the nation in narrow cultural, racial, and civilisational terms. Through everyday discourse that divides Indians into “insiders” and “outsiders,” “national” and “anti-national,” it creates a fake moral and political hierarchy of belonging.

In such an atmosphere, difference begins to look like disloyalty, and unfamiliar faces are treated as threats. The casual racial slurs hurled at Angel were not born in isolation; they are the social by-products of an ideology that relentlessly questions the Indianness of those who do not fit in its preferred image of the nation.

When nationalism is reduced to uniformity and suspicion becomes a civic virtue, violence no longer appears aberrant—it appears justified.

Angel Chakma was not so brutally murdered, merely by a knife; he was eliminated by a climate in which hate has been legitimised, empathy weakened, and constitutional citizenship steadily replaced by cultural exclusion.

What Angel Chakma’s Death Demands

The aspiring youngster came to Dehradun seeking education and belonging. He returned in a coffin.

His death forces India to confront a question it can no longer postpone:Are we a constitutional republic committed to equal citizenship, or are we drifting toward an exclusionary imagination of a nationhood where belonging is conditional and policed by appearance?

True patriotism does not demand sameness. It demands justice. It does not erase diversity; it protects it.

To insist that every Indian—whether from the Northeast, the Himalaya, the plains, or the coast—is equally protected by law is not dissent. It is fidelity to the republic.

If Angel Chakma’s killing fades into statistics and official evasions, the loss will not be his alone. It will be India’s loss — a slow, moral, and irreversible decline, from a vicious hate-quagmire, to an endless abyss.

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Suresh Nautiyal is an independent journalist, rights activist and green politician  based in Delhi and Pauri, Uttarakhand.

Pictures courtesy Social Media.