After drawing ire over calling Sonia Gandhi “white-skinned”, Union MinisterGiriraj Singh on Wednesday said that he regrets if he has hurt the Congress president and vice president Rahul Gandhi’s sentiments.
Watering down the whole incident, Singh said he did not make any official statement and a number of things are said off the record.
The Minister of State for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises had landed himself in another political controversy after he racially targeted the Congress president.
Sitting amongst a group of his supporters in Hajipur, Singh had asked jocularly whether Sonia’s “white skin” had been her ticket to securing the top job in the Congress party.
Stoking the controversy further, he had queried, “If Rajiv (Gandhi) had married a Nigerian, things would have been different.”
The Minister, who had courted controversies in the past with remarks during Lok Sabha elections like people opposed to Narendra Modi can go to Pakistan, also mocked Rahul Gandhi’s absence from the political scene and likened it to the “missing Malaysian airliner”.
“Imagine a situation, if Congress was in power instead of us and had Rahul been the Prime Minister, and if for some reason, the PM had disappeared for more than 47 days.”
“Absence of Congress vice president is similar to that of the missing Malaysian airliner that still has not been located. The same way the Congress leader was not present in the budget session. No one in Congress is ready to speak. This is unfortunate for the Congress and a joke for the country,” he said.
When asked about his controversial comments, Singh, who was in Delhi today, refused to comment. As his remarks snowballed into a major controversy, the BJP leader said if his comments have hurt Gandhi, he regretted them.
“If Soniaji and Rahulji have been hurt by my remarks, I express my regret,” he said even as he maintained that his remarks were “off the record” and suggested that media was blowing it out of proportion.
