Sam Pitroda — Congress's overseas unit chief who is back in the saddle after a seven-week break — today stood by his statement about diversity among Indians that were seen as racist, but admitted that he could have put it better. "It is not about words but about the meaning… but maybe I could have done a better job," he told NDTV in an exclusive interview. And about the row that followed that comment, he shrugged it off.
"I have to run my life. They can twist the fact that I live in Chicago and why I am talking about India… I would expect civilised conversation, dialogue… but that is lost… People are not interested in the substance of a conversation, they are interested in the form of the conversation," he said.
Mr Pitroda had stepped down from the post in May after his two consecutive statements sparked huge controversies. He was reinstated yesterday.
In an exclusive interview with The Statesman in early May, Mr Pitroda had described India as a "diverse country… where people in the East look like the Chinese, people on West look like Arabs, people in the North look like maybe White and people in South look like Africans".
It had triggered a huge uproar in the run-up to the election, coming on the heels of his comments about inheritance tax.
Barely two weeks before, Mr Pitroda had cited inheritance tax as an example of "new policies that can "help prevent concentration of wealth" which should be discussed and debated. The Congress, he had added, always helps people at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
His remarks were interpreted as advocacy of inheritance tax in India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had remarked that if elected, the Congress would redistribute the personal wealth of people among "infiltrators" and won't even spare the mangalsutras of women.
Mr Pitroda today said no one had questioned him about what he meant before jumping to conclusions. "When I made the comment on inheritance tax, I did not mean that I'm proposing inheritance tax. How do you come to that conclusion?"
His comments about diversity were also twisted, he said.
"Next time I said something about – my way of saying how diverse we are, people thought it was racial. There is nothing racial in saying that we came from Africa. It is a fact of life. And who says that being black is racist? No. I am dark. My wife is not very dark. So what?" he said.
"We tend to make issues out of nothing. And that's the reason I decided that is better to take myself out," he added. That was the way to bring back the focus on issues that matter, he said.
The row that followed Mr Pitroda's comments had threatened to derail the Congress focus on bread-and-butter issues like unemployment and inflation and the big picture issues of constitution and democracy.
After he stepped down, the BJP had called it a gimmick. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had remarked that it was part of the Congress strategy to spread "confusion" and that Mr Pitroda would be back.
The 82-year-old said his return was more a matter of "what needs to be done", pointing to the elections due this year in many countries, including the US, France, Germany. The Indian election had sent a message across the world, he said. Similar voices are rising across the world.
"Look at what happened in South Africa. The South African people also spoke loud and clear — that we would rather have a coalition with compromises than an authoritarian government. The message that Indian people have conveyed, that democracy is important, that message has to go across the world. That is a major task," he said.
In the recently concluded Lok Sabha Election, the Congress had won 99 seats on its own — up from its 2019 tally of 52. The INDIA alliance scooped up 232 seats.
The BJP fell short of a majority, winning in 240 constituencies, but the NDA was comfortably over the 272 mark, ending up with a figure of 293.