Miss Alone
Prime VIP
External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj said on Tuesday the killing of a Congolese man in south Delhi’s Vasant Kunj was not a case of racial attack.
“I held a meeting with African students… Tried to explain to them that the incident is huge but it isn’t an incident of racial discrimination,” Swaraj said at a news conference. “CCTV footage clearly shows that Indian citizens who were present at the spot (of the crime) tried their best to save Masunda Olivier.”
The Congolese teacher was bludgeoned to death a week ago allegedly by three Indian men after an argument broke out over hiring an auto-rickshaw. In a rare statement issued after the attack, a group of African ambassadors said African nationals were living in a “pervading climate of fear and insecurity” in Delhi.
They warned they may recommend their governments not to send students to India until safety conditions improve, following a string of what they said were unpunished racial attacks.
Police have arrested two of the three suspected of the killing.
“Being a mother, I can understand the pain of the parents of the Congo student who lost their son on a foreign soil,” Swaraj said on Tuesday.
Swaraj, in a series of tweets on Sunday, promised swift action against those involved in Thursday’s incidents as well as a “sensitisation campaign” for “areas where African nationals reside”.
Thousands of people from African countries study and work in India but several incidents have raised concerns of racist violence and discrimination.
In 2013, a Nigerian national was killed by a mob in the tourist state of Goa, with a state minister later calling Nigerians a “cancer”.
Delhi’s former law minister was also accused in 2014 of harassing African women after he led a vigilante mob through an area of the capital, accusing them of being prostitutes.
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