Mumbai women professionals echo Miss World Manushi Chhillar, say Shashi Tharoor’s tweet wasn’t offensive

On Sunday, Shashi Tharoor, Congress MP and one of India’s most articulate orators courted trouble over a joke he made about Miss World Manushi Chhillar.

Leaving aside his thesaurus-bending vocabulary, Mr Tharoor tried to make a WhatsApp joke about Manushi Chhillar, the Haryana girl who won Miss World for India 17 years after Priyanka Chopra brought home the gong.

In an attempt to mock demonetization, Tharoor tweeted, repeating a joke that had been made umpteen times since Chhillar won: “What a mistake to demonetise our currency! BJP should have realised that Indian cash dominates the globe: look, even our Chhillar has become Miss World!”

This joke however, seemed to rub section of Twitterati the wrong way, who felt Mr Tharoor’s joke wasn’t just a bad pun but also offensive to women, the Chhillar community and Manushi Chhillar.

While the NCW took great umbrage, and summoned Mr Tharoor to the commission for his ‘derogatory and degrading tweet’, senior Haryana ministers also attacked the politician.

Haryana Women and Child Development Minister Kavita Jain said Tharoor “indulged in callous and reckless wordplay on new Miss World Manushi Chhillar”. She said: “Tharoor has only exposed his own debased thinking by questioning the self-respect of our daughters, the pride …read more