On September 6, in Delhi's Ashram area, Chongtham Vikram Singh, a prolific musician from Imphal in Manipur, went out after dinner to do what thousands of Delhi residents do every night: take out the trash, walk off a meal, ask a knot of drunk men outside his building to lower their voices. He did not survive the request. That a noise complaint could end in death is, on its own, a tragedy of the kind Indian cities produce with grim regularity. What makes this one different, what has pulled Manipur's chief minister, Meghalaya's chief minister, the Minority Affairs Minister and the opposition parties into a single, uneasy chorus, is the near-certainty that Singh's origin, not his complaint, is what got him killed. The Delhi police have arrested seven men and a 15-year-old boy apprehended for the killing, which they are investigating as a case of “mob lynching”.
Ignorance of legal safeguards and lack of data
“Lynching is an affront to the rule of law and to the exalted values of the Constitution itself…” observed a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court in Tehseen S. Poonawalla v. Union of India & Ors. (2018), while issuing comprehensive guidelines to prevent lynchings and mob violence. When India overhauled its criminal laws, replacing the IPC with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023, it expressly recognised mob lynching as a distinct offence under Sections 103(2) (murder by mob) and 117(4) (grievous hurt by mob). Notably, Section 103(2) prescribes death or life imprisonment or imprisonment for a term not less than seven years, along with a fine, where five or more persons acting in concert commit murder on specified grounds such as race, caste, community, sex, place of birth, language or personal belief. On paper, this marks significant progress: conduct once prosecuted under generic homicide provisions now has a specific statutory label. Yet Mr. Singh's case exposes the gap between law on the books and law in practice: civil society groups reportedly had to sustain pressure before the Delhi Police registered the FIR under the appropriate provision. A remedy that depends on such mobilisation risks becoming uneven in practice, particularly for communities with less organisational, media or institutional access.
A major hindrance in addressing this menace is the lack of official data. The discontinuation of data collection on “mob lynching and hate crimes” in 2017 by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) further complicates the matter. The absence of a defined framework for crimes like 'hate crimes', 'cow vigilantism', and 'mob lynching' rendered the collected data unreliable, prompting the discontinuation of data collection in these areas, was the reason given by the Ministry of Home Affairs to the Lok Sabha in 2019. Further, the Union government, on March 24, 2026, informed the Parliament that it has no centralised data on incidents of “hate speech, racial slurs, harassment and discrimination” against people from the north-eastern states, claiming that 'police' and 'public order' were state subjects. The result is a state that can accurately tell you how many two-wheelers were stolen in Uttar Pradesh last year but cannot tell you, in any official document, whether targeted violence against a specific community is rising or falling. A phenomenon that is not counted cannot be trended, cannot be budgeted against, cannot be used to justify a new fast-track court or a new special unit, because there is no baseline against which “improvement” or “deterioration” could ever be measured.
Yet some fragmented studies exist. The most rigorous effort to quantify racial discrimination against people from the Northeast is now over a decade old. The Bezbaruah Committee, constituted after the 2014 Lajpat Nagar killing, told the Delhi High Court that 86% of roughly two lakh Northeastern migrants to Delhi between 2005 and 2013 had faced racial discrimination, the highest among Indian metros. A separate National Commission for Women-commissioned study found that 60% of Northeastern women across four metros had experienced harassment, including verbal abuse (42%) and molestation (26%). During the pandemic, a Delhi-based rights group recorded 22 incidents of racial abuse in just seven weeks, spanning college campuses and public transport.
Equal protection, unequal belonging
Although Mr. Singh's killing is not an isolated incident, as racial discrimination against people from Northeast India remains a persistent concern, the case exposes a constitutional failure of the State that helps explain the fragmented political response. Mr. Singh was from Manipur, killed in Delhi. Article 14's promise of equal protection is addressed to “any person”, not filtered by domicile, yet in practice a citizen's safety while working or studying outside his home state depends entirely on the goodwill and political priorities of a government he did not elect and which owes him no direct electoral accountability. Policing is decentralised in a way that federalism handles well for questions of local order, and handles very badly for questions of a minority's safety when that minority is a numerical irrelevance to the host state's electorate.
Lynching discriminates against a whole community and violates Articles 14, 15, and 21 of the Constitution. Thus, “it is the seminal requirement of law that an accused is booked under the law and is dealt with in accordance with the procedure without any obstruction so that substantive justice is done”, the top court observed in the Tehseen case. However, this cannot be achieved without comprehensive data or by drafting special laws and conforming with the SC's guidelines.
Further, it is worth pausing on the banality of the trigger. Nearly every publicised incident in this pattern begins at the most mundane interface of urban life: a noise complaint, a parking dispute, a disagreement over repair work, a remark about smell or food. These are disputes that, between two members of the locally recognised majority, would likely end in a shouting match or, at worst, a police complaint about public nuisance. They turn lethal specifically when one party is visibly marked as an outsider, because the underlying assumption being enforced is not really about decibels; it is about who has standing to object to anything in that shared space at all. Sociologically, this is closer to what scholars of internal migration call boundary policing than to random criminality: the aggressors are not disputing the content of the complaint so much as denying the complainant's authority to make it as a resident with equal claim to the street, the stairwell, the neighbourhood.
This brings into focus the constitutional idea of “unity in diversity”. In St. Stephen's College v. University of Delhi, the apex court recognised that India's unity is not founded on uniformity, but on the ability of diverse geographical, religious, linguistic, racial and cultural identities to coexist and flourish within the constitutional framework. In the context of such crimes, these distinctions cannot determine whose rights deserve protection or whose suffering commands attention. A victim does not become less entitled to dignity, equality or protection because of his caste, religion, race, region or class; nor can an accused claim immunity from the law based on such identities. The State's obligation is therefore not merely to punish individual acts of violence, but to ensure that every citizen, particularly those living away from their home States, can claim an equal right to safety and dignity. A constitutional democracy cannot meaningfully celebrate diversity while allowing prejudice against particular communities to determine who belongs, who is protected, and whose voice is heard.
Authors are Lawyers based in New Delhi and currently working as Law Clerk-cum-Research Associate at the Supreme Court. Views are personal.