ajay gautam covers his eyes

Hum Hindu founder, Ajay Gautam, received a lot of criticism on Twitter after he appeared to have covered his eyes on television to avoid seeing a Muslim anchor.

Gautam had started Hum Hindu in 2015 and the organization is renowned for its right-wing ideology. It's sole objective is "of complete Swaraj, absolute Hindu Rashtra" as described on the website. The site also mentioned that they were against the politics of Muslim appeasement.

The incident in question took place when Gautam appeared as a panelist for a debate on News24TV channel to discuss the controversial Zomato incident. When he saw the anchor, whose name is Khalid, he closed his eyes and refused to see him by closing his eyes on live television.

The moderator on the show told Khalid not to worry about Gautam and encouraged him to go on.

News24's editor-in-chief, Anurradha Prasad expressed how horrified she was at the incident and put out a statement saying that the news channel will not be inviting Gautam on their channel ever again.

She tweeted, "we at the newsroom of @news24tvchannel are in shock at the inappropriate & condemnable behaviour of Mr Ajay Gautam. Ethics of journalism do not allow to give platform to such devisive voices & gestures @news24tvchannel has decided not to invite Mr Ajay Gautam to its studio."

The irony of the situation was that he came to talk about the bigotry of a Zomato customer who wanted to cancel an order because his delivery executive was a Muslim while Gautam literally covered his eyes to avoid seeing a Muslim anchor.

When the customer took to Twitter to mention the food delivery app's failure to refund his money, Zomato clapped back saying, "Food doesn't have a religion. Food is religion."

The clip of Gautam covering his eyes went viral on social media and Twitterati had quite a lot to say about it.