Around the 50th minute of the 54-minute, 42-second tape, Nixon says, “Undoubtedly the most unattractive women in the world are the Indian women. Undoubtedly.”
Former US President Richard Nixon, as revealed in a set of newly declassified tapes from the White House, had stark hostility towards India and Indians. During a meeting with senior officials at the Oval Office on June 17, 1971, Nixon referred to Indians as the “most sexless” and “pathetic”, and called Indian women the “most unattractive women in the world”.
After Gary J Bass of Princeton University filed a legal request for their declassification, the tapes were recently declassified and released in batches up to May this year. Bass reported the tapes in his opinion piece in The New York Times published on Friday.
Henry Kissinger, the National Security Adviser during that time, also helped fan Nixon’s antipathy towards Indians. Kissinger also determined US policy towards New Delhi in the early 1970s, Indian Express reported. A republican by political affiliation, Richard Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 until 1974.
His NSA Kissinger also said that Indians were “superb flatterers” whose “great skill” was to “suck up to people in key positions”.
The declassified White House tapes reveal a ‘stunning’ conversation between Nixon, Kissinger, and the then-White House chief of staff HR Haldeman in the Oval Office in June 1971 in which Nixon asserts in a ‘venomous tone’ that Indian women are ‘undoubtedly the most unattractive women in the world’, Bass has claimed. Nixon also went on to call Indians ‘most sexless’, ‘nothing’ and ‘pathetic’, according to the tapes.
“On Nov. 4, 1971, during a private break from a contentious White House summit with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India — a rare woman leader at the time — the president harangued Mr Kissinger about his sexual disgust at Indians,” Bass wrote.
Around the 50th minute of the 54-minute, 42-second tape, Nixon says, “Undoubtedly the most unattractive women in the world are the Indian women. Undoubtedly.”
“The most sexless, nothing, these people. I mean, people say, what about the Black Africans? Well, you can see something, the vitality there, I mean they have a little animal-like charm, but God, those Indians, ack, pathetic. Uch,” Nixon adds, followed by laughter from the attendees, a report in the Indian Express stated.
In the opinion piece titled ‘The Terrible Cost of Presidential Racism’, Bass says: “As Americans grapple with problems of racism and power, a newly declassified trove of White House tapes provides startling evidence of the bigotry voiced by President Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser.”
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