The Congress on Friday slammed senior BJP leader Kailash Vijayvargiya for his remarks that ‘labourers who had eaten poha (flattened rice) while working at his residence looked like illegal Bangladeshi migrants’ and demanded an apology.
Addressing a press conference at the party headquarters, Congress spokesperson Sushmita Dev said “this is the real face of the government which is watching your eating habits”.
“We condemn the statement made by Vijayvargiya ji. He has connected the food of the construction worker to his nationality and called them the infiltrators,” said Ms. Dev.
“If a responsible senior leader of the BJP like Mr. Vijayvargiya can today declare someone as a foreign infiltrator because he or she is having ‘poha’ as is being reported, you can profile a census on nationality and connect it to national security. This is the reason why we are saying that this Government will use the National Population Register (NPR) for profiling people,” she added.
“This is the way we suspect the government will conduct the NPR [survey] to do profiling on the basis of religion, on the basis of community, on the basis of language and now even food.”
The controversy erupted after Mr. Vijayvargiya claimed that he suspected that the labourers who had been engaged for construction work at his Indore house could be Bangladeshis as they had ‘strange’ eating habits.
“Two days after I became suspicious, they stopped working at my house. I have not filed any police complaint yet. I only mentioned this incident to warn people,” the BJP leader was reported as having said while speaking at a meet to support the Citizenship (Amendment) Act.
