India not racist, our country accepts South Indians: BJP's Tarun Vijay

New Delhi: Bharatiya Janata Party’s Tarun Vijay, in a shocking remark, said that Indians cannot be considered ‘racist’ because they are accepting of South Indians.

He made these remarks on a television debate on racism on Thursday.

After facing severe backlash for the same, the BJP leader has apologised saying that he did not convey what he had meant to.

"If we were racist, why would we have the entire south? Which is you know... completely Tamil, you know Kerala, you know Karnataka and Andhra. Why do we live with them? We have blacks, black people all around us," he said on air.

Admitting that his choice of words sounded “ridiculous” and “very bad”, Vijay clarified in a series of tweets he had meant to say that India’s racial demographic is diverse, but it has never been an issue for its citizens.

He also took the example of Lord Krishna, saying that while Krishna means black, we worship him; reiterating his stand that racism was not a problem in India.

“I feel the entire statement was this- we have fought racism and we have people with different colour and culture still never had any racism (sic),” he tweeted.

“My words perhaps were not enough to convey this. Feel bad, really feel sorry, my apologies to those who feel in said different than what I meant (sic),” he said in a tweet.

"I never, never, even in a slip, termed south India as black. I can die but how can I ridicule my own culture, my own people and my own nation? Think before you misinterpret my badly framed sentence," he tweeted in response to accusations of racism.