I had barely had my morning coffee when a notification made the coffee redundant: my eyes were wide open as I read that Sonam Raghuvanshi had surrendered. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you, our dear reader, are well aware that for the past two weeks, the news of a couple gone missing in Meghalaya’s Sohra has dominated local and national media.
And whenever national media descends upon the Northeast, it brings not only its latest equipment but a healthy dose of loud reporting, where facts become secondary and pre-set narratives take the lead. So, for Times of India, the mere fact that two people went missing (in a state with over 3 million people and over 1 million tourists annually) was proof enough to call Sohra “crime-prone.”
This is not an isolated case, of course. Hindi news channels, hardly a beacon of rationality and honest reporting, went even further — but I will not bother addressing them or their work. No standard is low enough for them in their hunt for numbers.
Our reporter, meanwhile, kept things simple: Princess Giri Rashir is a Ramnath Goenka Award winner who once again showed how true journalism needs neither screaming nor fake narratives — it just needs a person to listen to the facts.
She was the one who broke the news that three other tourists, also speaking Hindi, were last seen with the missing couple. She interviewed the guide who took the couple to their destination, and she walked mile after mile with NDRF and SDRF personnel as they searched, in vain, for Sonam’s body. She endured the abuse that Meghalaya received every day on social media because she knew: trolls will remain trolls.
We at EastMojo, from day one, reported the news with respect, care, and attention: we spread no conspiracy theories, we leaked no information, we did not give in to the fight for more views, and we remained steadfast in our coverage.
This is also perhaps why our coverage has received the love it has on social media. Our videos are being shared extensively, watched by hundreds of thousands every day, and the common theme across all comments: well done EastMojo, well done Princess.
But I want to address a far more important and crucial issue, which, I believe, deserves attention: when is a crime just a law and order situation? Because it seems in the Northeast, the reaction to a murder is directly dependent on who the victims are and who the perpetrators are.
The national media was not worried about the fact that two people died in Meghalaya. Their attention was solely because two “tourists” from mainland India had gone missing in the Northeast.
You see, the lives of tourists are always valued more than those of locals — and nowhere is this more evident than in Northeast India. In this case, the Sohra locals were not only accused but convicted by the national media even before the bodies had been found.
The fact that from day one, Sohra locals have been working day and night to locate the bodies without receiving a dime in return does not matter. The experiences of millions of tourists who roam around happily in Meghalaya do not matter. The testimonies of guides and experts do not matter.
Racism is not just discrimination against someone based on their color or features — it is also the dismissal of their narratives. When locals pleaded innocence, it was met with cynicism rather than compassion.
Such was the pressure on the police that they could not even speak about the idea that maybe, just maybe, Sonam was not dead: that she was alive and had played a role in killing her husband.
Even when we pointed out that in 2023 too, a body from outside Meghalaya was dumped in Sohra in an effort to blame locals, few paid attention.
The case of Raja Raghuvanshi and Sonam Raghuvanshi will now move to the Hindi heartland. Meghalaya’s role and Sohra”s role, for now, seems over.
But what will forever leave a bitter taste in the mouth is the sheer abuse that the state and its residents received for doing nothing — except searching for the victims through rain and fog, through cold and humidity, and for no return.
And this, my dear readers, is precisely why we need media houses like EastMojo — that speak for locals, and not on behalf of those who suffer from a superiority complex that shows no sign of ending.
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