Anand Mahindra slams BBC anchor for questioning India’s space mission

New Delhi. Chairperson of Mahindra and Mahindra Anand Mahindra, replied to an old video doing rounds on X (formerly Twitter), in which a BBC journalist can be seen asking a panellist if India needed to spend so much money in space programme when there were 700 million people living in poverty in India.

Anand Mahindra in his elaborate reply teared into the journalist’s logic of questioning India’s space endeavours. The business tycookohn also gave a befitting reply on the question of poverty posed by the BBC journalist. Mahindra said in his tweet how the British colonial rule had “plundered the wealth of an entire subcontinent”.

“Really?? The truth is that, in large part, our poverty was a result of decades of colonial rule which systematically plundered the wealth of an entire subcontinent. Yet the most valuable possession we were robbed of was not the Kohinoor Diamond but our pride & belief in our own capabilities. Because the goal of colonisation-its most insidious impact-is to convince its victims of their inferiority. Which is why investing in BOTH toilets AND space exploration is not a contradiction. Sir, what going to the moon does for us is that it helps restore our pride & self-confidence. It creates belief in progress through science. It gives us the aspiration to lift ourselves out of poverty. The greatest poverty is the poverty of aspiration”.