New Delhi: Congress party on Wednesday reappointed Sam Pitroda as the chairman of Indian Overseas Congress a month and a half after he resigned following controversial remarks on race and ethnicity.
Pitroda, during a podcast in May amid the Lok Sabha elections, described physical appearances of Indians using ethnic and racial identities.
“We have survived 75 years in a very happy environment where people could live together, leaving aside a few fights here and there. We could hold a country as diverse as India together. People in the east look like the Chinese, people in the west look like the Arabs, people in the north look like, maybe, white and people in the south look like Africa… It does not matter. All of us are brothers and sisters. We respect different languages, different religions, different customs, different food,” Pitroda had remarked.
The BJP slammed Pitroda’s racist remarks and pounced on the Congress, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi referring to the former as the ‘guru’ of ‘shehzada’ (Rahul Gandhi).
Earlier, in April, Pitroda had stirred another controversy.
As Congress was defending BJP’s charge that the grand old party’s manifesto spoke of redistributing the wealth of people to Muslims, Pitroda added fuel to the fire by speaking about an inheritance tax.
“In America, there is an inheritance tax. If one has $100 million worth of wealth and when he dies he can only transfer probably 45 per cent to his children, 55 per cent is grabbed by the government. That’s an interesting law. It says you in your generation, made wealth and you are leaving now, you must leave your wealth for the public, not all of it, half of it, which to me sounds fair,” Pitroda told ANI.
“The advisor of the prince of Congress royal family had earlier said that the middle-class should be taxed more. Now they have gone further ahead by saying that it will impose an Inheritance Tax and tax the inheritance received by people from their parents. The wealth you accumulate with your hard work won’t pass down to your children. The Congress’ hand will snatch it,” Modi slammed Pitroda.
