Thokmay Dorjee
Sikkim
Another alleged video involving a group of students from Nagaland surrounding another child has gone viral. There is shoving, hair-pulling and abuse and the point is humiliation as much as pain.
Somebody holds up a phone. Within a day the clip is on WhatsApp groups across the district, and within a week it has reached people who will never know the child's name but will remember her face.
The latest came from Mon district. A girl attending a private coaching centre was allegedly forced into a restroom by other students, beaten, and had her clothes torn and her hair cut off with scissors while the attackers filmed it. The clip has travelled as far as a national Reddit forum. An investigation into its origins yielded 0 results, so the footage circulating appear to be original and many claim that allegedly it has first been circulated in private Whatsapp groups of Schools in the Mon District of Nagaland.
If all this is true, Mon is not an outlier. On 31 May 2025 in Chümoukedima, nine or ten girls surrounded another girl, shoved her and pulled her hair while hurling abuse, according to the Eastern Mirror, and some could be heard threatening to make the video viral. In August 2019, Mokokchung police arrested three people after a video spread showing a juvenile girl being assaulted and forcibly undressed. And as teachers and the state's own school board have acknowledged, most bullying never reaches a camera, or even a teacher.
What makes this pattern hard to explain is that Nagaland has been warning about bullying for years, in writing.
A problem the state has named before
In 2013 the Nagaland Board of School Education directed every head of institution to set up an anti-bullying and ragging committee, adopt a zero-tolerance policy and employ counsellors to support students, according to the Eastern Mirror. A decade later, in 2023, the board said students were seeking transfers because of bullying in some schools and called the prevalence of bullying among school-going children a grave concern, with severe short and long-term consequences. It reminded schools again to maintain robust committees.
On 2 June 2025, two days after the Chümoukedima video, the board issued a third directive. Every registered school was to form an anti-ragging and anti-bullying committee with staff, parents and students on it, install complaint boxes so that victims and witnesses could report anonymously, run regular awareness programmes and counselling sessions, and train staff to handle complaints promptly and with empathy.
The state's School Safety and Security Guidelines, issued by the Directorate of School Education, also provide for an anti-bullying committee in schools. The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights has its own guidelines on bullying and cyberbullying. In an editorial in September, the Nagaland Post concluded that Dimapur's schools did not lack a policy framework. What they lacked was implementation.
No public record shows how many of Nagaland's schools actually have a working anti-bullying committee, how many complaints those committees have received, or what happened to them. When the Eastern Mirror reported on the 2013 directive, it noted that it remained unclear whether schools had heeded it. That is still the honest answer.
What bullying looks like now
Most bullying is not filmed. Teachers in Dimapur describe a range from teasing, name-calling and humiliation to social exclusion and physical intimidation, according to the Nagaland Post, and many children never report it for fear of retaliation, embarrassment or being labelled a troublemaker. The Central Board of Secondary Education treats physical, verbal, social and cyber bullying as distinct forms of harm, and the last of these has changed what a bully can do.
A child bullied in a classroom used to be able to go home. Now the bullying can follow her into WhatsApp groups, Instagram and gaming chats long after the school day ends, and a single video can reach an audience with no limit. When the Chümoukedima attackers threatened to make their video viral, they were naming the real weapon. The beating lasted minutes. The recording lasts as long as anyone keeps a copy.
That is why child protection officials treat the sharing as harm in its own right. After the Chümoukedima clip spread, the district child protection unit warned that forwarding it violated the Juvenile Justice Act and hurt the child again, and asked people to report it to Childline on 1098 instead. The 2019 Mokokchung arrests were for violating the girl's privacy and transmitting obscene material involving a minor, separate from the assault.
The clips also tend to arrive without a source. A reverse image search of frames from the Mon video returned few results and no earlier copy, and where it was first posted has not been established.
The public's anger can do damage too. After the Chümoukedima video, one student union demanded that the girls involved send in apology videos along with their personal details. The fury was understandable. But turning children who bully into the subject of the next viral clip repeats the cruelty, and where those children are under 18, Section 74 of the Juvenile Justice Act forbids identifying them at all.
The rooms the rules do not reach
The board's directives cover registered schools. The Mon attack took place in a coaching centre, a sector Nagaland only began to regulate in November 2025. Guidelines notified on 26 November require any centre with more than 20 students to register with its district administration and to run a counselling system, and some districts ask centres to show they have a student grievance committee.
Above those sits the Supreme Court's order of 25 July 2025 in Sukdeb Saha v. State of Andhra Pradesh, which requires coaching institutes, schools and colleges with 100 or more students to engage a qualified counsellor and every institution to have written protocols for referring a student in distress.
On paper, then, the restroom in Mon should have sat inside a system with a counsellor and a grievance route. In practice, the All Nagaland College Students' Union told the chief secretary in a representation reported in July that more than five months after the guidelines took effect, not one coaching centre in the state had been formally registered. A child bullied in a building that is not registered has no committee to complain to, no counsellor on the books and no inspector who has ever checked.
What would make a difference
None of the remedies are new. The Nagaland Post's editorial set out the basic ones, a confidential way to report, a functioning counsellor, teachers trained to notice withdrawal, fear and falling marks, and clear procedures once a complaint is made. The Eastern Mirror has argued that parents need to talk to their children about bullying and report it when they hear of it. The board's own directives already ask for most of this.
What is missing is evidence that any of it is happening. A simple public audit would go a long way. How many schools and coaching centres in each district have an anti-bullying committee? How many complaints did they receive last year, and how were they resolved? How many students sought transfers because of bullying, the problem the board itself flagged in 2023? Until those numbers exist, every new video will be treated as a shock, when it is really a symptom.
