Blood donors were stunned when they came across a tweet that blood from only a particular caste donor was required for a three-year baby undergoing treatment at a Hyderabad hospital. The tweet reads, “Only
Kamma caste donors, O + (positive) blood needed at Max Cure Hospital. Three year child. Please call …..”. However, attempts to call this number remained unsuccessful as the number seems to be an invalid one. “You are not dialing a valid number” is the answer it gets. The tweet was by a person called Shekarnews associated with
Blood Donors India . While social media groups and other blood donation groups like the Friends2Support were up in arms against the “castiest tweet”, the Blood Donors India group too felt embarrassed about it. The group deleted the tweet with regrets.“We are sorry if you were offended by an earlier tweet.
We want to help others and are repeating info we get. We will now take greater care”, the group tweeted, followed by another tweet on Friday morning, “There was a tweet sent out yesterday that mentioned caste, which was obviously wrong. This was human error and not deliberate. My apologies.”
A spokesperson of the leading blood donation group Friends2Support said such irresponsible tweets on behalf of groups would bring insult to the sacred blood donation movement. “Blood is to save a life and it has no caste, creed, religion and region. Let this sacred movement not be contaminate by such perverts”, he said.
Meanwhile, several social groups took serious exception to the tweet. Members of a WhatsApp group recalled a recent statement of
Andhra Pradesh chief minister N
Chandrababu Naidu that nobody would want to be born as a Dalit. The CM passed this comment about four months ago at a time when the suicide of Dalit student
Rohit Vemula was shaking the Hyderabad Central University. “When the CM (who belongs to the Kamma caste) talks of caste, the feelings percolate down to every level. This is what we see in the tweet for blood”, said one of the posts.
