Indian steps down as Oxford union president

Jubilee News Desk

Rashmi Samant the first Indian female president of Oxford University students’ union was forced to quit the post amid backlash after ‘racist’ and ‘insensitive’ social media posts from her past were unearthed just days after her election.

Samant who was criticised over several social media posts and branded ‘insensitive’ has apologised to ‘every student who has been hurt by my actions’. “Despite writing an open apology students did not think I was sincere enough. I could not see the point os starting presidency in such a manner,” Samant said.

She has been defended by the Free Speech Union, whose general secretary Toby Young said it was ‘disappointed’ to see Samant resign from her post and said her apology ‘should have been enough’.

Samant issued a grovelling apology for the posts, she resigned after coming under pressure from the Oxford Campaign for Racial Awareness and Equality and the LGBTQ+ Campaign. She also appears to have since deleted both her Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Rashmi Samant – who styled herself as the ‘inclusivity’ candidate and campaigned to ‘decolonise’ the Oxford syllabus and remove ‘imperialist’ statues – announced she is withdrawing as President-Elect of the union following criticism of several online posts dating as far back as 2017, for which she has since apologised.

Ms Samant previously claimed that the phrase ‘Ching Chang’ translates from Mandarin to ‘eat the plants’ – an inside joke about her vegetarianism – but Mandarin speakers said the term is a reverse Google Translation not used by native speakers.

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The student, from Karnataka in South-West India, was accused of racism after she captioned a photo of herself in Malaysia with the words ‘Ching Chang’ and made a play on words about the Holocaust while at the memorial in Berlin. She was accused of being ‘insensitive’ by Jewish students after uploading a photo to Instagram at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.