Nearly a week after Goa's Chief Minister laxmikant Parsekar and Tourism Minister Dilip Parulekar passed negative remarks against Nigerian nationals living in Goa, former Chief Minister and senior Congress leader Ravi Naik on Tuesday went a step further referring to them as 'Negros' and demanding that Central Government ban Nigerians from entering India.
"Nigerians come here and do dadagiri, in Delhi, Bengaluru and the entire country. We should run the Nigerians out of here. The Government of India has to try," Naik told The Pioneer.
"The Government of India should ban them… They should be probed. It should be checked whether they are here to study or for picnics or to sell drugs," said Naik, who was also former Home Minister in the erstwhile Congress-led coalition Government.
Naik also referred to Nigerians as 'Negros' in his interaction with the media on Tuesday, saying that the State had enough of Nigerians and that Goa did not need Nigerian tourists.
"Have they come here to studyIJ Are they really studyingIJ Are they really going to colleges, schools or are they going to bogus schools or bogus typing schools, this has to be probed. It is very important. They say they have come here to study, but are they really studyingIJ The State Government has to keep a tight watch on their illegal activities," Naik also said.
The obvious trigger to outrage against Nigerians in Goa, primarily stems from an incident in 2013, when a mob of 50 Nigerians beat up policemen, locals and blocked the National Highway 17 for several hours protesting police inaction in the alleged murder of a compatriot by a local drug mafia. Two Nigerians were severely hurt in the retaliatory assault by locals.
Defending the slack police efforts to rein in the chaos, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, who was the state Chief Minister at the time, had said that it was difficult for the physically inferior local police to take on the well-chiselled Nigerians.
"They are huge and aggressive. Some of them are seven feet tall. It would take at least 100 of our policemen to handle a crowd of 50 Nigerians... Can you handle a Nigerian one-to-oneIJ Someone make sure he is covered by insurance," Parrikar had said then.
While Parrikar's comments may have been sarcastic his fellow Bharatiya Janata Party legislators were less gracious towards the Africans.
After the 2013 incident, Goa's Art and Culture Minister Dayanand Mandrekar called Nigerians a cancer to society, while Sanguem MlA Subhash Phaldesai compared Nigerians with "wild animals" who were always "pumped with drugs".
In May, after the rape of a woman allegedly by a Nigerian national, Chief Minister laxmikant Parsekar, said that he was constantly getting complaints about Nigerians annoying the local residents. "The Goans in general are complaining about these foreigners in particular, even though we get people from all other countries," Parsekar said, even as Tourism Minister Dilip Parulekar said that Nigerians masquerade as students, sell drugs in Goa and prolong their stay by getting involved in crimes and using the judicial process as cover to stay back in India.