Mahindra Group chairman Anand Mahindra on Thursday slammed a BBC anchor for questioning India’s area mission in an previous video that resurfaced on social media. The presenter within the video might be seen asking a panelist if “India needed to spend money on a space program when there were 700 million people living in poverty in the country”.

“You know I’m going to have to ask you because some people are thinking about this. India, a country that lacks a lot of infrastructure, a country that has a lot of poverty…I think more than 700 million Indians don’t have access to a toilet. Really, Really, should they really be spending this sort of money on a space programme,” the BBC anchor might be seen asking within the video.

Replying to this on X, previously generally known as Twitter, Mahindra lashed out saying, “Really?? The truth is that, in large part, our poverty was a result of decades of colonial rule which systematically plundered the wealth of an entire subcontinent. Yet the most valuable possession we were robbed of was not the Kohinoor Diamond but our pride & belief in our own capabilities.”

He added, “Because the goal of colonisation—its most insidious impact—is to convince its victims of their inferiority. Which is why investing in BOTH toilets AND space exploration is not a contradiction. Sir, what going to the moon does for us is that it helps restore our pride & self-confidence. It creates belief in progress through science. It gives us the aspiration to lift ourselves out of poverty. The greatest poverty is the poverty of aspiration.”

In a giant increase to India’s area programme, India’s Moon mission Chandrayaan 3 landed on the lunar south pole at 6:04 pm on Wednesday after an extended journey of 41 days. With this, India turned the primary ever nation to land on the Moon’s south pole and simply the fourth nation to land on the lunar floor after Russia, China, and the US.