I'm a proud Naga tribesman born in a small town of Manipur, a state in North East India. I Left Imphal, Manipur due to growing civil unrest among the different ethnic communities in my teenage years and this civil unrest remains unresolved until today. It's even gotten from bad to worse.
Growing up in the metro cities, I have faced racial profiling a thousand times over. One gets used to such insults over time or just look the other way round. I would often just laugh it off or try to correct the person. It is the same everywhere. NE people coming to the metro cities get racially profiled, Indians going abroad getting racially profiled and the cycle continues. So, what's news when Sashi Tharoor mocks at the traditional headgear of the Naga people who are settled across the mountains of Nagaland, Assam, Arunachal and Manipur?
FYI, the Naga people comprises of over 40 different tribes each speaking their own dialects!
First and foremost, I look up to Sashi Tharoor as a man who "should" one day lead the Nation as the Prime Minister of India. To lead this country forward, move away from the narrow mindedness of the people with regards to caste, religion and truly build a Nation to be at par with the rest of the world. How did one single speech change all that for me, personally?
Is our current PM Narendra Modi an Islamophobic? He raised a very important question that Narendra Modi or his party would never be able to answer for the obvious reasons. In the process, to mock and call a traditional wear of my Naga tribesmen as "hilarious" is unfortunate. He did justify by saying that it is the right thing for the PM to do; wear such traditional clothings and reminded the audience listening to his speech that even Indira Gandhi did the same. This however brings in an important question about Tharoor's personality, his upbringing and how rigid is his frame of mind towards another tradition or culture. It is really shameful that the man I look up can even think this way. His question about why Narendra Modi never wears a Muslim cap got drown in the controversy.
Having said all that, would the Nagas be forgiving and would we forget this particular incident? The opposition party won't but the Naga people won't care. It's all politics. BJP is known to have ties with RSS, there's no denying that. RSS have known to have been against minorities and has been always against Christians, Muslims and other non-Hindu religion but did that hinder the Naga politicians (who are Christians by birth) to stay away from BJP? No. Our elected representatives don't care about our own Naga people. Money speaks in politics and sadly, for someone to win an election, it's money that helps the way to the throne. BJP won't be in power forever. Congress will come back to power at the Centre sooner or later and the Naga politicians would need that money and Tharoor's favour at one point of time. This incident may forever haunt Tharoor even if he apologises but it won't matter in the end.
PS: If Sashi Tharoor joins BJP today, all this would disappear. Just saying.