A group of seven African nationals – three men and four women – were rounded up by locals in a bylane in Delhi’s Chhatarpur, and attacked with iron rods, cricket bats and sticks. Racial slurs were hurled at them throughout. The attacks were spread out over half an hour between 10:30 and 11 PM on the night of 26 May.
The incident has understandably caused a diplomatic hiccup for India, coming as it does just a week after a Congolese national Masonda Kitanda Olivier was beaten to death in the same neighbourhood.
But, the junior minister for External Affairs, General (retd) VK Singh tried to play it down as a “minor scuffle” that the “media was blowing up”.
While many congratulated him for “speaking the truth”, there were others who questioned VK Singh’s idea of “minor scuffle” and the lynching of the media for reporting a hate crime.
So Who’s Surprised?
No one who’s the least bit familiar with General VK Singh’s dislike for the Indian media.
In April 2015, VK Singh was monitoring a rescue mission from war-hit Yemen when he joked about it not being as exciting as his visit to the Pakistan Embassy on the country’s National Day. When the “country’s #1 English news channel” decided to get angry about the comparison, the Union MoS, External Affairs stooped to a whole new level of vile while abusing Times Now’s Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami.
Unfortunately, the “presstitutes” moniker has stuck around, much to our collective chagrin.
But one couldn’t really blame the first-time Minister for having to live through a “disgust”ing experience in the line of his new “duty”.
The Union Minister of State for External Affairs had been rather grumpy about having to attend Pakistan’s National Day celebrations earlier that week. The ex-Army Chief thought diplomacy to be beneath him when he had to rub shoulders with Pakistani officials and the Hurriyat.
One doesn’t need to work one’s imagination to gauge how trolls reacted when photographs of VK Singh sharing a hearty laugh with Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit emerged.
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