Oxford University student row: 'Can't turn our eyes from racism' says Jaishankar

Before Meghan Markle and her sensational allegations of racism in the royal family, there was Rashmi Samant. The first Indian woman to have been elected president of the Oxford University Student Union (OUSU), Samant resigned after controversy over "racist" social media posts she had made years back.

After returning to India, Samanth said she was cyberbullied and that her parents and religion had been brought into the matter because they were Hindu. While Oprah Winfrey threw her might behind Markle, Samant now officially has a bigger backer: The government of India.

“As the land of Mahatma Gandhi, we can never ever turn our eyes away from racism. Particularly so when it is in a country where we have such a large diaspora. We’ve strong ties with the UK. We’ll take up such matters with great candour when required,” Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar said in Parliament on Monday. The minister was responding to BJP leader Ashwini Vaishnav, who raised Samant's case in the house.

According to Vaishnav, Samant had been “cyberbullied to the point that she had to resign," agencies quoted him as saying. 

In what does amount to support, Jaishankar said India was “monitoring all such cases and the developments in it closely.” “We will raise the issue when required and we will always champion the fight against racism and other forms of intolerance,” he said.

The Indian government has opted to bat for Samant just a week after the UK Parliament held a debate last week where concerns were raised over India's handling of the farmer's protests. India reacted strongly to the discussion, terming it “unwarranted and tendentious" and summoning British High Commissioner Alex Ellis to South Block to lodge a protest. 

However, the debate took place because of a public petition that garnered 115,000 signatures—under UK law, petitions that get over 100,000 have to be debated in parliament. The British High Commissioner was told in no uncertain terms that the discussion “represented a gross interference in the politics of another democratic country”,  a media statement said. Ellis was “advised that British MPs should refrain from practising vote bank politics by misrepresenting events, especially in relation to another fellow democracy”. A statement by the Indian High Commission in London dubbed the debate a “distinctly one-sided discussion”. 

The Samant case gives India a chance to use a narrative—one that is likely to be a red flag for Britain—to make a larger point. Especially as the racism issue, amid allegations by Markle against the Royal family, generated debate the world over. 

Samant's election win was hailed as a big victory for South Asia in the battle for equality. But she had to step down as some of her older social media posts were considered “anti-Semitic” and “racist” generating outrage. The Oxford Students Union Campaign for Racial Awareness and Equality (CRAE) and Oxford LGBTQ Campaign called for her ouster.  

A picture of Samant outside the Berlin Holocaust memorial saying “The memorial casts a hollow dream of the past atrocities and deeds” was deemed offensive. Another picture from Malaysia posted with “Ching Chang” was also seen as racist to Chinese students. 

The first in her family to go to University, Samant claimed that the odds were against her winning.

“In the chain of unfortunate events since, what hurts me the most is that my parents were dragged in the most insensitive manner: Their religious sentiments and regional background were insulted in the public domain. The fact that I am a Hindu in no way makes me intolerant or unfit to be the President of the Oxford SU. Contrary to this, I understand the value of diversity in its true sense, though my exposure to the intricacies of the developed world is limited,'' she wrote in an article on News18. 

“It is my firm belief that one cannot fathom the impact of colonisation wearing the lens of the coloniser. I refused to hold the view that colonisation was a positive experience for the indigenous people of the colonies. I ran the campaign on decolonisation to highlight that the perspectives of people from the Global South derived from the historical experience of others were conveniently gaslit to deflect any kind of introspection about those this University considers ‘heroes.’ The idea was to make the students of Oxford truly reflective on taken for granted notions of colonisation,'' Samant has written in her piece posted on a website.

This is not the first time that racism and how it is perceived in a post-colonial society has stoked controversy at Oxford University. In 2015, the 'Rhodes Must Fall' movement reached the campus, as students called for a statue of colonizer Cecil Rhodes to be removed from Oriel College.