By Amit Roy
RASHMI SAMANT found out the hard way last week that those who live by Twitter can die by Twitter – or Instagram or the various forms of social media.
Rashmi was elected president of the Oxford Students’ Union (SU) by a handsome margin – she got 1,966 votes out of 3,708 cast – but had to resign almost immediately. This is because someone went through her past social media posts and found she had posted a picture of herself in Malaysia that was captioned “Ching Chang”.
On the controversy about the Cecil Rhodes statue at Oriel College, she had commented: “If an organisation would come up to you and give you a heap of money to set up a scholarship and say, ‘I want to name this the Hitler fund or the Hitler scholarship’, would you do it?”
The LGBTQ+ Campaign was also “alarmed” by something she had said.
Rashmi sought to head off the mounting calls for her resignation, but in the end she announced on Facebook: “In light of the recent events surrounding my election to the presidency of the Oxford SU, I believe it is best for me to step down from the role. It has been an honour to be your President-elect.”
Then she flew back home to India to get away from her fall from grace.
Being an ethnic minority woman from a former British colony, she had promised as part of her election campaign “to lobby the University and Conference of Colleges to remove all statues proven to be imperialist and conduct a comprehensive consultation on the decolonisation of syllabi”, and also “divest entire the financial portfolio from fossil fuels”.
In a way, I feel sorry for Rashmi. We would all be in trouble if we are held to account for things we might have once said in our madder moments. In British universities, students find it all too easy to be offended these days, so much so that the government is appointing a “free speech champion”.
Anyone with ambitions of a public life should adopt the new safety-first law of social media: cancel all your accounts and don’t say anything about anything.
