I married into a Brahmin family, I'm now a Brahmin: Sheila Dixit

Congress chief ministerial candidate for Uttar Pradesh Sheila Dikshit on Wednesday asserted that she is now a Brahmin as she married into a Brahmin family, in a counter to Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh's remark describing her as Punjabi.

She said a woman is known through the family she is married into and she is Brahmin as she married a Brahmin person. "Amar Singh should know this fact. I am now a Brahmin," she said. Singh, a Rajya Sabha MP, in a statement to a private news channel had stated that Dikshit is not Brahmin but a Punjabi who married into a Brahmin family.

Dikshit, a prominent Brahmin face of Congress, was chief minister of Delhi for three terms and is being projected by the party as the chief ministerial candidate for the Assembly elections in Uttar Padesh slated to be held early next year. The Congress leader who arrived here for a "27 saal UP Behal" yatra also lashed out at the separatists in Kashmir for "attempting to divide the country" and called upon the government to resolve the situation in the Valley at the earliest.