Chennai: A “racist cartoon” in the Australian newspaper showing starving Indians attempting to eat solar panels with mango chutney has provoked anger in the country. The Australian is run by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp and the cartoon was drawn by Bill Leak, one of Australia’s best-known cartoonists.
The cartoon, published two days after over 190 nations, including India, signed the historic climate change agreement in Paris on Saturday, shows an emaciated Indian family breaking up solar panelsand trying to eat them with ‘mango chutney’.
The newspaper now faces a tirade of criticism on social media. David Pope, a cartoonist from the rival newspaper The Canberra Times, said in a tweet: “How backward is Aust #climate politics? Here, the absurdracist rubbish published by Murdoch’s national newspaper.”
Amanda Wise, an associate professor of sociology at Macquarie University, said the cartoon would be unacceptable in the UK, the US or Canada. “It is unequivocally racist and draws on very base stereotypes of third world, underdeveloped people who don’t know what to do with technology,” Wise was quoted as saying in the Guardian Australia.
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