A major outrage began on X after Republican Congresswoman Beth Van Duyne posted a photo of her meeting with Rishika, a student at Princeton University. The anti-India statement has become so strong that every time a Republican leader does anything that has a connection with India, MAGA immediately disavows the action. A very recent example was Montana Governor Greg Gianforte’s visit to India. All his posts drew flak from MAGA as they questioned what business a Republican Governor can have with India.Congresswoman Beth Van Duyne faced the same trolling. “On Wednesday, I met with Rishika, a student at Princeton University working with the Scientist Network for Advancing Policy. Rishika shared her work advocating for the continuation of American leadership in scientific research and innovation. We discussed how policymakers can support STEM workforce development,” Beth wrote.
Here are the reactions:
- “This is exactly why the US is falling behind in every single scientific field. We are trusting our scientific future and giving our best opportunities to random foreigners who don’t actually give a shit about America. Beth Van Duyne endorses this. She is a terrible leader,” one wrote.
- “Any American students from Texas universities you could have met with?,” another wrote.
- “I thought your solution was to send people like Rishika back to their home countries?” a third user wrote.
Many MAGA commentators called this a tone-deaf thing to do at a time when Americans are not getting jobs. Some commentators pointed out the precariousness of the situation where a Congresswoman cannot post a picture with anyone of Indian ethnicity without drawing hate comments. Some users observed that this trolling would be damaging for Rishika’s career while some called Rishika a scammer.
Is Rishika Porandla a ‘scammer’?
Earlier this year, Rishika Porandla retracted her own research paper, which was published in 2024 in an engineering journal due to “significant methodological errors”. According to reports, Porandla admitted that she never conducted the experiments described in the study. “The beam experiment described in the paper was a proposed experimental workflow with associated calculated results,” she wrote in an email to Retraction Watch. “Public confusion led me to recognize and regret that this is not clear in the retracted publication, and I have included detailed clarification in an updated retraction statement to Wiley.”“I no longer felt comfortable having the paper remain in the scientific literature because I knew that other researchers could potentially cite it, build upon it, or use it to inform future work,” she said. Since the retraction, she has been conducting follow-up work to address the weaknesses in the original study and is working toward a corrected version of the article for the journal, Retraction Watch reported.
