India: BJP Minister Giriraj Singh's comments about Sonia Gandhi and Nigerians are nothing short of racism

No country for people like Giriraj

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

Published: 22:49 GMT, 1 April 2015 | Updated: 22:50 GMT, 1 April 2015

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Giriraj Singh's comments about Sonia Gandhi and Nigerians are nothing short of racism

Giriraj Singh's racist remark on Sonia Gandhi, even if it was made off the record (as he now claims), has really no place in an aspiration-driven India.

His remark, which comes not many days after the Goa Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar, shocked the nation by asking agitating nurses of his state to sit in the shade so that they didn’t get dark and hurt their marital prospects, betrays the patriarchal worldview that complements a fanatical brand of politics.

Shockingly, Giriraj Singh is the minister of state for mini, small and medium industries, which is kept in working order mainly by women (whether they are making bidis or assembling IT hardware).

He should have learnt to respect working women by now, by virtue of association, but it is hard to expect that of a man who clearly has patriarchy programmed into his ideological DNA.

It is important not to take such comments as isolated fulminations of the BJP’s loony fringe, but to point to the themes that keep recurring in them.

If Sakshi Maharaj is the champion of an India, where Hindu women will have to become reproductive machines to ‘counter’ the already vastly outnumbered Muslims, and if Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti can give BJP trolls on Twitter a lesson or two in the use of abusive language, we must not forget that Giriraj Singh earned his first 15 minutes of fame when he advised opponents of Modi to migrate to Pakistan.

If that statement exposed how much he believes in the pluralistic foundation of our democracy, his Sonia Gandhi barb smacked of a similar intolerance.

It’s a pity that at a time when achche din remains an elusive ideal, the flag-bearers of regression are the only ones making the news.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-3022040/WHIPLASH-No-country-people-like-Giriraj.html