Chaotic scenes were witnessed in Parliament on Monday when the Congress party raked up the issue of ‘racism’ remark made by Bharatiya Janata Party leader Tarun Vijay in an interview to a foreign news channel. Demanding action against the BJP leader, Congress veteran Mallikarjun Kharge said they will agitate not only inside but outside the House too if the party fails to act against Tarun Vijay.
“What action are you going to take? Otherwise we will have to agitate not only inside but outside too,” Kharge said. He also said that the BJP leader’s comment shows his “mentality”. “Do you want to divide India, he asked.
Making a statement over the issue Home Minister Rajnath Singh said that India is a secular country and any discrimination on the basis of caste, creed, colour cannot be allowed here.
Vijay is facing the heat for saying that if India was racist then it wouldn’t have had a place for the South Indians in the country. “I don’t know who you are, whether you’re an Indian or you belong to some other nation. But you know the entire South India. There is Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra. There are black people all around. So if we were racists, why would we be living with these black people? You are denying us of our ancestory. You are denying us of our history. This is not good. We can be as good or as bad as any other human community,” Vijay told the news presenter.
Sensing that his statement has pulled the wrong chords, he clarified himself on Twitter saying: “I said we worship Krishna, which literally means black, we were the first to oppose any racism and were in fact victims of racist British.” He also accepted that his comment “sounds ridiculous and very bad.”
“My words perhaps were not enough to convey this. Feel bad, really feel sorry, my apologies to those who feel i said different than what I meant,” he added.
Vijay was making the statement in an interview with a foreign news channel where he was defending that there is no racism in India.