"We are not chinese, we are Indian": Arunachal girl's video goes viral
A young girl from Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh, has gone viral after standing up for her Indian identity when someone online called her "Chinese." Her response has sparked a larger conversation about how people from India's Northeast are often wrongly identified based on how they look.
The girl, Karga Tinkle Gongo, four-year-old, was first filmed by her mother while out buying ice cream, an ordinary moment posted online without any expectation of attention. According to media reports, a social media user who saw this video commented, asking why a "Chinese" child was speaking Hindi and questioning whether a Chinese child would even know the Hindi language.
According to media reports, Tinkle's mother told her daughter about the comment, and Tinkle grew upset upon hearing it, insisting that they were not Chinese, they were Indian.
In the viral video, Tinkle firmly said "We are also India. We are Indian people. When you call us Chinese, we get very angry, we feel very hurt. Don’t call us Chinese, call us Indian. We belong to India. We live in Itanagar."
Her mother added that the family never expected the video to go viral, and that Tinkle had been visibly hurt by the original comment.
The video has struck a chord because many people from Northeast India say they often face the same problem of being mistaken as foreigners because of their appearance, even though they are Indian citizens. This isn't the first such incident either; there have been other cases in the past involving racist comments directed at people from Arunachal Pradesh online.
