Yoga guru Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali Ayurved courted controversy when reports came that the company has defamed Assam in a global platform.
Plant manager at Patanjali Ayurved, SB Singh, in an interview with the New York Times, has said that people in Assam have bad habits like eating non-vegetarian foods.
During the interview, Singh also said that people in Assam do not know how to respect the nation and so the Patanjali had to conduct 380 workshops to teach the values.
The New York Times report quoted Singh as saying: “We are mentally conditioning them.”
Patanjali ran more than 380 workshops for prospective employees, where it taught a “value system”. Assam’s people, Singh explained, had “bad habits”, including eating non-vegetarian food and a lack of proper respect for the nation. “They’ve been listening to corrupt politics from corrupt people for too long,” he said. “We take what our sages said thousands of years ago and put it to use. We didn’t invent it. We took what’s available in our scriptures and put it in a modern format,” Singh told the New York Times.
The comment didn’t go down too well as the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), an ally of the BJP government in Assam, has demanded an apology from Patanjali Ayurved after the company manager’s statement.
The AGP termed Singh’s remarks as “rubbish” and demanded an apology. “This is absolutely rubbish. This kind of attitude will never be tolerated in our state. They don’t know the culture and history of our land. We would urge Patanjali to ask their representatives to study before making such irresponsible statement. We demand an apology from Patanjali,” Manoj Saikia, a senior leader of the AGP, was quoted by the Outlook.
