‘As a proud Hindu…’: Shashi Tharoor reacts to Ashok Singhal's ‘gobi farming’ post

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor (file image)

Congress leader Shashi Tharoor is the latest among the bevy of opposition leaders who reacted sharply to the use of 'gobi farming' imagery by an Assam Cabinet minister after Bihar poll results.

Assam Cabinet minister Ashok Singhal, in a post on X on Friday afternoon, had shared a photograph of cauliflower farming with the caption "Bihar approves Gobi farming".

Weighing in after he was tagged by a user in a reply to the original post, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, responding to the post, indirectly replied to the Assam leader’s “gobi farming” post. Tharoor said that he is not a community organiser, so joint statements are not his job.

One of the users, @isaifpatel on X, replied to Singhal’s post, saying that a cabinet minister, no less, is “glorifying the massacre of 116 Muslims to celebrate an election victory”. He tagged Tharoor and asked if the senior Congress leader could get a few influential Hindu leaders to condemn this “normalisation of one of the worst pogroms perpetuated against Bihari Muslims”.

The photo, many users on social media said, is linked to the "cauliflower burial case" or the Logain massacre, an incident that took place during the Bhagalpur communal riots in 1989 in Bihar. Reports said more than 110 Muslims were killed in Logain, a village in the Goradih block of Bhagalpur district, and cauliflower saplings were placed on the ground where the bodies had been buried.

Hitting out on Singhal, state Congress president and party's deputy leader in Lok Sabha, Gaurav Gogoi wrote on X: "The use of 'gobi farming' imagery by a sitting cabinet minister of Assam in the wake of the Bihar election results marks a shocking new low in political discourse. It is both vulgar and shameful." He maintained that the image is "widely associated with the Logain massacre of 1989, where 116 Muslims were killed and their bodies concealed under cauliflower plantations during the Bhagalpur violence".