Who’s the Man Waving Indian Flag at the US Capitol Building?
The new year was expected to bring much-needed stability to the world but recent events at the US Capitol have reinstated the fact that a date change on the calendar does nothing to real life. For those who don’t know yet, the US Capitol building was a siege by Trump supporters while protesting vote counts in the Presidential election. The East woke up to pictures of confederate flags being waved inside the US capitol building for the first time in the history of the USA. There was however one picture that caught the eye of many from India.
The above pictures that has the Indian tricolor being waved at the capitol sent the Indian left into a frenzy. They assumed the person waving the flag was an Indian right-wing Modi supporter. They started putting stereotypes about the Indian right-wing on all the social media.
The guy’s name is Vincent Xavier is an engineer and Virginia State Committee Member of the Republican Party and from the looks of it, he is not a Modi supporter. Vincent Xavier has openly criticized Modi for his handling of Kerala floods, demonetization, and CAA among other policies. Here are some of his tweets that clearly show him ideologically different from the Prime Minister of India. In an interview with News18 he said he was at the Capitol as an Indian American Trump supporter.
As is the case with any person who becomes famous for his political ideology, people started to dig Vincent’s old tweets and Facebook posts to make their case. Well, it turns out he was a Modi supporter in 2013 but later criticized his policies. He is also a Shashi Tharoor supporter and has had meetings with him in the US. Supporters of both sides are in a mud-slinging competition to use Vincent Xavier’s unusual approach to bring down the other side. These people however often forget that a man often changes with time and so do his ideologies as he learns and becomes more experienced. There is not one correct side neither is the other side wrong. Maybe Indian people could take a lesson from this incident that one should not jump to conclusions without knowing the full picture.
