When it comes to prejudice, perhaps Pitroda and some of his critics are painted in the same hue.
No one can accuse Sam Pitroda of choosing his words too carefully. After giving the 2024 Lok Sabha campaign one of its main talking points with his comments on inheritance tax, the former Indian Overseas Congress chairman has once again kicked off a row that his party is scrambling to distance itself from and which has cost him his position. With the intention of celebrating Indian diversity, Pitroda said in an interview, “People in the East look Chinese, people in the West look like Arab, people in the North like, maybe, White and people in the South look like African.” Surely, Pitroda, a longtime US resident, should know the connotations of such descriptors and their links to prejudice.
The fact that there is something truly unique and wonderful about how India, despite all its differences, holds together needs more nuanced articulation. But is it really surprising that, coming from a nation which still props up a skin-lightening industry worth several thousand crores, Pitroda’s instinct, in explaining Indian diversity, was to latch onto differences in colour and facial features? If anything, this instinct is merely an extension of the still widely-held belief in India that the hue of one’s skin is not just a matter of melanin count, that it says something about the value of the flesh and blood underneath.
There is, in fact, a rich irony in the outrage over Pitroda’s words, given that much of the ire is directed at the comparison of south Indians to “Africans”. This strand of condemnation is based on the assumption that to be compared to Africans is somehow undesirable — given the history of racism against people of African origin. A post script: Some decrying Pitroda’s comments have called out the African parallel, not the “White” one. When it comes to prejudice, perhaps Pitroda and some of his critics are painted in the same hue.
