Raja Raghuvanshi Murder: North’s Pathetic Bias Against The Northeast

Raja Raghuvanshi Murder: Queer Lens on Northeast Bias

The murder of Raja Raghuvanshi in Meghalaya was not just someone's personal tragedy — it became a national mirror, cracking open the layers of deeply embedded bias that North India, particularly the Hindi heartland, harbours toward the Northeast. 

But for me, as a queer man, it reflected something even more sinister, more familiar. The disdain that burst out in media narratives on the Raja Raghuvanshi murder, and the venomous spew on social platforms, didn’t just target Meghalaya. It echoed the same disdain I’ve felt as a gay man in North India—this suffocating, smug superiority that cloaks itself in cultural centrality, dismissing everything outside its narrow frame as suspect, savage, or simply irrelevant.

Raja Raghuvanshi Murder: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗱𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗙𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘇𝘆

On May 23, 2025, Raja Raghuvanshi and his wife Sonam, both from Indore, disappeared near the mist-veiled serenity of Wei Sawdong Falls in Meghalaya. It was meant to be a honeymoon, a celebration. Instead, it ended in horror: Raja’s body was later found in a gorge, throat slit, valuables gone. A Special Investigation Team was formed; by June 9, Sonam had surrendered in Uttar Pradesh, accused of orchestrating the murder with help from her alleged lover and hired killers. Her family cried foul, alleging a police conspiracy. His family demanded the harshest penalties.

As details emerged, what should have remained a criminal investigation became instead a canvas on which North Indian media and social media began to paint sweeping, prejudiced strokes about Meghalaya—and, by extension, the entire Northeast. 

Instead of compassion or nuance, we got suspicion, blame, and cultural profiling. Kangana Ranaut pounced on it, calling the case “dumb” and “absurd” with her usual performative outrage. It was all too familiar—an event reduced to a spectacle, then turned into an indictment of an entire people.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮 𝗠𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗲: 𝗧𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 Raja Raghuvanshi 𝗠𝘂𝗿𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝗮 𝗠𝗮𝗽 𝗼𝗳 𝗛𝗮𝘁𝗲

The North Indian press did what it often does: it grabbed the ethnicity and location of the murder and ran with it. “Meghalaya murder.” “Tribal involvement.” “Northeast savagery.” The framing wasn’t about justice—it was about drawing boundaries, reaffirming bias. Ethnicity became the headline. Reddit users from the Northeast rightly asked why their identity is always the newsworthy hook. One remarked: “When it's us, it’s ‘Naga woman this,’ ‘Khasi man that.’ But when someone from Kanpur commits a crime, do they write ‘UP Brahmin arrested for fraud’?”

This obsession with the 'other'—with marking bodies and communities from the Northeast as alien, dangerous, or exotic—bleeds from the press into daily discourse. And I recognise it because this is the same game played with queer lives. We’re always ‘the gay man found murdered,’ ‘the trans woman caught in controversy,’ always spotlighted through the filter of what makes us different—never just people, never just citizens.

𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮 𝗠𝗼𝗯-𝗠𝗶𝗻𝗱: 𝗛𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗮 𝗛𝗮𝘀𝗵𝘁𝗮𝗴

If the media loaded the gun, social media pulled the trigger a thousand times over. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram were flooded with vitriol: “These people are not like us,” “The Northeast is not safe for tourists,” “Savages in the hills.” North Indian influencers—many with massive followings—amplified this nonsense, feeding a toxic narrative of “mainlander victimhood.” A pattern emerged, not unfamiliar to anyone who's watched how queer people get mobbed online: the incident becomes an excuse for character assassination, for fear mongering, for exclusion.

Meghalaya’s cybercrime cell had to arrest users and open nine cases for hate posts. But the damage was done. A murder became a megaphone for everything wrong in how North India sees the Northeast: not as part of the family, but as the stranger in the attic.

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗜𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝗡𝗲𝘄: 𝗜𝘁'𝘀 𝗦𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗶𝗰, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗜𝘁'𝘀 𝗨𝗴𝗹𝘆

This kind of bias isn’t a one-off—it’s a rot. A 2009–10 survey by the Northeast Support Centre found 86% of Northeasterners living in Indian metros reported facing racial discrimination. Slurs like “chinky,” accusations of “not being Indian,” or assumptions about being “Chinese” are everyday occurrences. During COVID-19, Northeastern people were targeted with disgusting comments—“Corona carriers”—and denied entry to shops and apartments.

Let’s not pretend this is just media sensationalism. It runs deeper. It lives in daily microaggressions, in restaurant jokes, in the refusal to learn their names or dialects. It lives in the assumption that Hindi is default, that mainland tastes are universal, and that the East is exotic at best, expendable at worst.

And again, I feel this personally. I come from a world where queerness is seen not just as different but as dangerous, immoral, shameful. North India has long been a particularly brutal place to be queer—not just in its laws but in its locked minds. The arrogance with which it deems itself the cultural norm is the same arrogance with which it declares the Northeast abnormal. And that shared pain, that parallel exclusion, is why I cannot stay silent.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗿𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗛𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗱

At the center of this is the North Indian superiority complex. It wears many faces. There’s the cultural disdain: dismissing bamboo shoot curries as “smelly,” mocking fermented foods, sneering at languages not wrapped in Devanagari script. There’s the linguistic imperialism: the relentless push for Hindi as a national language, the way local tongues from Khasi to Malayalam are mocked as “dialects,” as if they are lesser.

There’s the media machine: “Godi media” that — often with silent backslapping from the powers that rule us —  packages every narrative in North-centric terms, where tragedy in a tribal region is always attributed to backwardness, while the same crime in Ghaziabad is a “family matter.”

And worst of all, there’s the everyday Indian who, knowingly or not, walks through life assuming that the rhythms of Uttar Pradesh and Delhi are the baseline of Indian identity. Who exoticises Manipur, ridicules Odisha, erases Nagaland, finds Tamil men dark skinned, and fears anything that cannot be tamed by Bollywood or Bhojpuri beats.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘁: 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁, 𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝗪𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗱

Of course, the Northeast is not perfect. In online forums, some tribal users shut down dialogue, branding all mainlanders as racist invaders. There’s frustration and fatigue, and sometimes it hardens into a siege mentality. But even here, I find kinship. Because queer people too, in the face of repeated betrayal, can grow bitter, insular, and defensive. It's not always right—but it is understandable.

People in the Northeast are fighting not just for recognition, but for their right to define themselves—outside of exoticisation, pity, or scapegoating. They are asserting autonomy, whether through inner-line permits or cultural preservation. Their refusal to assimilate isn’t rejection—it’s survival.

And if India has any soul left, it should listen.

𝗝𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗲, 𝗡𝗼𝘁 𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗲𝗴𝗼𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴

Local leaders in Meghalaya spoke out swiftly after the backlash. Ministers warned the media against defamatory reporting. Youth organisations clarified that this crime—though horrific—did not represent the region. But North India kept wagging its finger. The punishment wasn't meted out to Sonam or her alleged accomplices; it was doled out, indiscriminately, to the entire Khasi population, to all of Shillong, to every brown-eyed, high-cheekboned youth who dared to exist outside the cowbelt mold.

This is what prejudice does—it collectivises guilt. And that’s something queer people know all too well. One gay man is caught in a sting, and suddenly all of us are predatory. One trans woman gets into a fight, and every hijra is painted a menace. It’s the same lazy brushstroke. It’s the same moral panic.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗠𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲—𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝗪𝗵𝗼 𝗠𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲

North India must look in the mirror—and not flinch. It must change the way it talks, the way it thinks, the way it covers stories. Media must stop using “tribal” like a warning label. Journalists must learn that ethnicity is not always relevant, and often harmful when spotlighted without context.

There must be cultural humility. It’s not enough to tolerate the Northeast—we must celebrate it. From cuisine to costume, poetry to politics, we must treat their stories as integral to the Indian mosaic, not mere footnotes. And Hindi must lose its god-complex. India does not need a singular voice—it needs a symphony.

And the Northeast, too, must stay open to dialogue—harsh, vulnerable, honest conversation. It must resist the temptation to treat all critique as colonisation. Victimhood must not ossify into identity.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗤𝘂𝗲𝗲𝗿 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗙𝗮𝗯𝗿𝗶𝗰

When I speak as a queer man, it’s not as a distant observer. It’s as someone who knows how it feels to be othered, dehumanised, laughed at, excluded from the definition of “normal.” The prejudice against the Northeast is not separate from homophobia—it’s a sibling born of the same father: phobia of difference.

We queer folk know what it's like to be the “problem.” We know what it’s like to have our love dismissed as perversion, our identities dissected, our existence debated on primetime TV. And so when I see the Northeast put on that same slab—cut open, misunderstood, belittled—I feel solidarity. And fury.

𝗔 𝗖𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗼 𝗥𝗲𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗿—𝗡𝗼𝘁 𝗝𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗠𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻

Raja Raghuvanshi’s murder deserves justice—not scapegoating. It was a horrific crime, not a referendum on the people. But the backlash it triggered is revealing. It shows us that the bridges between regions of this country are flimsy, fragile, and dangerously overdue for repair.

We must rebuild. Through education—where Delhi University students can study in Kohima, and vice versa. Through cultural fellowships—where Manipuri dancers collaborate with Mumbai choreographers. Through media reform—where Northeast journalists edit Delhi stories and break North Indian biases.

But above all, through listening.

Let this be a reckoning. Let it be a rejection of easy stereotypes, lazy nationalism, and dangerous cultural pride. Let it be a queer call to embrace multiplicity, and a national call to abandon arrogance.

Because India isn’t a monoculture. It never was. It is a riot of voices, bodies, rhythms, and rituals. From Imphal to Indore, from Shillong to Surat, from Sonam to Raja—every story counts.

Only when we honour all of them can we finally, truly, be one.