The telegraph
India’s Foreign Minister suggests that the dismissal of the Oxford student union president was due to racism
The Oxford University student union got involved in a diplomatic dispute after India’s foreign minister suggested that its president’s recent resignation was due to racism. Rashmi Samant, a graduate student reading for a master’s degree in energy systems at Linacre College, was elected to the post in February, after getting 65% of the vote. She was supposed to take office at the end of the summer semester and had promised to “combat homophobia and institutional transphobia” and “decolonize the curriculum”, but resigned days after being elected after a series of colleges passed motions of censure after a reaction against the “racist” comments she made on social media. The Oxford International Society said at the time that “for a candidate who campaigned for inclusion, it is overwhelming to understand that this was not sincere in nature”, citing her “anti-Semitic, transphobic and racist posts on social media”. Ms. Samant was also criticized for a 2019 Instagram post of a photo taken in Malaysia with the caption “Ching Chang”. She defended the post against accusations of being “synophobic”, saying it was a joke with a friend about her vegetarianism. During an event organized by the student publication Oxford Blue last week, she compared Cecil Rhodes to Hitler, saying that “no one erected statues of Hitler”. Speaking about her desire to “decolonize” Oxford, she said to the students, “I just want to ask you a question. If an organization came to you and gave you a lot of money to open a purse and say, ‘I want to call this Hitler’s fund or Hitler’s scholarship, would you do it? “The Jewish Society of Oxford said it was” extremely concerned “about its social media posts, including a caption for a photo of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial that showed” severe insensitivity ” and ignorance “, as well as his comparison between Rhodes, a British imperialist, and Hitler. Now the case has caught the attention of Indian parliamentarians and members of Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata (BJP) Party. On Monday, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the foreign minister, told lawmakers that he would be willing to raise the issue with Britain. “Like the land of Mahatma Gandhi, we can never take our eyes off racism, wherever it is, especially when it is in a country where we have a large diaspora,” he said. “We have strong ties to the UK. We will address these issues with great candor when necessary.” Ashwini Vaishnaw, a member of the BJP, described Samant’s treatment as “a continuation of the attitudes and prejudices of colonial areas, especially in the United Kingdom”. He said Sumant was “cyberbullying” until the resignation, adding, “If this happens at an institute like Oxford, what kind of message is going to the world?” The intervention of the Indian Foreign Minister came after Sumant returned to his family in Udupi, a city in the southwestern state of Karnataka, and told The Indian Express that she was the victim of a “crowd of the culture of cancellation “. She said: “There was a conscious attempt to dig up posts made by me in the past. These posts have always been there, but no one raised any problems during the electoral process. It was only after I won that they were brought up. I believe my posts they were not malicious or racist. To be offended, you have to perceive it in a certain way. “