Bhaiyya row like black issue, says Congress MP Manish Tewari

Congress MP Manish Tewari on Friday likened Punjab chief minister Charanjit Singh Channi's use of a pejorative against the people of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to "the Black issue in the US", highlighting the rift within the party even on the last day of the campaigning for the state assembly election.

"De-Horse Politics - The Bhaiya controversy is like the Black issue in the US . It is reflective of an unfortunate systemic and institutionalised social bias against migrants stretching back to the inception of the Green Revolution," Tewari, who is also part of the Congress change-seekers, said in a post on microblogging site Twitter.

He said that despite his mother being a Jat Sikh and his father "being the foremost exponent of Punjab-Punjabi-Punjabiyat who laid down his life for Hindu-Sikh amity", because of his surname, "it is said behind my back 'eh Bhaiya kithon agha' peppered with the choicest expletives in Punjabi".


"We have to root it out. Such thinking should have no place in the secular ethos of Punjab grounded in the idiom - Manas ki jaat sabhe ek pehchan (recognising the whole human race as one)," he said.

Tewari made no direct reference to Channi, but his remarks left little doubt about the context.