As PV Sindhu Fought Hard For a Medal, Indians Googled Her Caste
People in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are also claiming her as their own.
It unmasks the irony of the 21st century like nothing else.
While PV Sindhu was training hard and pushing herself beyond her limits to get India a medal at the Rio Olympics, thousands of Indians, Google statistics show, were searching for her caste-identity.
It was first called to everyone’s attention by Vivekanand Nagarajan on his Facebook wall.
The News Minute looked up the Google Trends statistics for the term “PV Sindhu Caste” – the results were unsurprisingly disturbing.
The interest over the past 7 days for the term “PV Sindhu Caste” peaked around the time she won her semi-finals and finals, as you can see in the graph below.
And in the last one day, there has been a heavy search for her caste, as you can see below.
Here are the top states in India which googled her caste in the past 7 days.
And the top countries in the world.
What about absolute numbers?
We culled out the stats for the search term in May, June and July 2016.
As you can see, there were more than 150,000 searches for her caste in June, and nearly 90,000 in July.
Now look at the spike in search for the term in August compared to July, from Google trends.
In August, there were at least 10 times more searches for her caste compared to July. So, effectively, millions of Indians have searched for her caste so far.
And not just that. Worldwide, the search for the caste of her coach, Gopichand, has also been rising as you can see here.
Why are they searching?
There is the obvious explanation that Indians are caste-minded people, but there could be a hint here, an ongoing fight between people in Andhra and Telangana to claim her as their own. And to prove it, they want to know which caste she belongs to.
Did you say that caste does not exist in modern India?
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