Indian workers ‘hardest’ to understand: US Guv

A day after Donald Trump mocked Indian call centres using a fake accent, one of his avid supporters, Maine’s Republican Governor Paul LePage, stoked his own controversy by commenting that Indian workers are the hardest to understand and that one requires an interpreter to follow them.

LePage, however, couched his pungent comments by describing Indians as “lovely people” in much the same way as Trump called India “a great place” after impersonating an Indian call centre worker with a face accent while denouncing outsourcing of American jobs to other countries.

Known for his penchant for controversies, LePage came up with his latest bit while addressing Maine’s Republican Convention on Saturday. At one point, he touched on foreign workers, saying it was hard to understand workers from Bulgaria, adding workers from India were “the worst ones” in this regard. Indians, he went on to say, were “lovely people but you’ve got to have an interpreter”.

The comment was an aside indulged in by the Governor at the State convention where he was supposed to deliver a good chunk of Maine’s Republican delegates in Trump’s column. But he miserable failed on this score, as 19 of the 20 delegates chosen by the convention, barring himself, are supporters of Trump’s main rival, Ted Cruz.

The fight that was witnessed at the Maine convention in Bangor is being viewed as a precursor to what is in store for Trump at the Republican National Convention in July in case he fails to muster the requisite 1,237 delegates to clinch the nomination outright.

Cruz, despite not doing well in several primaries and is overall lagging behind Trump by about 300 delegates, is outdoing in terms of wooing delegates, as has been seen in Colorado, Wyoming and Louisiana.

At the Maine convention, Governor LePage mounted a stinging attack on the Cruz campaign, accusing it of going back on its promise to back a ‘unity slate” of the State’s delegates. “Cruz’s Northeast Political Director David Sawyer lied to us and broke the deal. Sawyer stabbed us in the back, reneged on the unity slate, and betrayed the people of Maine,” he complained, going on to say that Cruz’s campaign was being run by “greedy political hooligans”.

Dismissing the charge, Cruz’s communications Director Alice Stewart said: “Ted Cruz stands with the grassroots, who made our caucus victory in Maine possible. Cruz will always defend the interests of the people who elected him over the will of establishment politicians.”