Uttam Ghosh offers his take on Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's remark on onions in the Lok Sabha on on Wednesday, December 4.
During a discussion on the rising prices of onions, Sitharaman declared: 'I belong to a family which does not eat onion and garlic', a comment which drew comparisions to Marie Antoinette, the French king Louis XVI's ill-fated spouse on social media.
Antoinette did not utter the phrase she is damned with in history -- 'Let them eat cake' -- but Sitharaman's sentence will go down in parliamentary annals as the kind of comment finance ministers should not make when hundreds of millions of Indians cannot have onions in their curries because they cost over Rs 100 a kilo.
