NEW DELHI: Congress’ Udit Raj on Monday publicly endorsed White House trade counselor Peter Navarro’s controversial ‘Brahmins profiteering’ remarks. “I completely agree with @RealPNavarro…,” he posted on X amid outrage sparked by the remarks of Trump’s aide, adding, “In fact, private Indian oil refiners are from upper castes, and it will take decades, perhaps centuries, for so-called lower castes to become oil refiners.””It is true that corporate houses owned by upper castes are buying cheap oil from Russia and selling it to other countries after refining. Indians are not benefiting from this at all,” he said, in remarks which appeared to be in tune with his party’s attack on “elites”, “privileges” and “merit”: all of which were seen as shorthand for the party’s current priority to raise a coalition of non-upper castes. Udit Raj’s colleague from Tamil Nadu, MP Karti Chidambaram, said “Boston Brahmins is a term used to describe the elite of society in common parlance”.Ironically, Brahmins in US have, for some time, been at the receiving end of Navarro’s staunch ideological opponents in US, the liberal hawks usually aligned with the Democrats. A few years ago, Civil Rights Department of Democrat-controlled California sued Cisco Systems at the instance of a PIO employee who alleged that he was denied a leadership position by his upper caste colleagues; chiefly Sundar Iyer, an alumnus of Bombay IIT. Iyer who denied the charge and won a significant victory against Civil Rights Department, lamented about being accused of casteism. “Civil Rights Department assigned Brahmin caste to me,” Iyer had famously remarked while rebutting the charges against him.Equality Labs, widely seen as a group of activists who are unlikely to agree with Navarro and Trump’s MAGA movement has taken upon itself to document alleged cases of caste-based discrimination in US: something which the Hindu groups have flayed as an attempt to divide Indians and, particularly, Hindus.The influence of “liberals” has appeared to be on the wane since Trump’s success last Nov, with many Democrats and centrists blaming the success of MAGA on “woke activism”. “It is an irony that their vocabulary seems to have seeped into MAGA camp as well,” remarked an observer here.
