There is an old English saying “Politics is a dirty game”. On the 70th birthday of PM Modi, Indian politics became even murkier than ever before when politically motivated twitterati came together to disparage prime minister Modi. Politicians may be rival to each other, they must respect the post of Prime Minister. And if one doesn’t like his works, they have full rights not to cast their vote to him next time.
That’s how democracy works. People elect a leader and give them 5 years of time. If they like their work, they give another chance- or else they drive them out. If the opposition desiderates power, it should appeal chivalrously to people to cast votes to them, not to BJP in next election. Downgrading the post of Prime Minister of India is no way justifiable.
Poor economy and unemployment
We witnessed -23.9% GDP rate for the first time in the annals of independent India. Surprisingly most of the world’s major economies, which had imposed a nationwide lockdown, too recorded negative growth first time ever. In my opinion, it would be imprudent to say it was surprising in any case when the whole nation was shut, it was expected the country would suffer gigantic loss and it wouldn’t be easy to recover therefrom.
Economic Times reported on April 23 that India suffered a loss of 8 lakh crore in just 21 days. Taking both population and poverty into consideration, India suffered more than the developed world did. Good News is that experts in the finance ministry believe that India is witnessing V- shaped recovery which suggests that GDP graph fell down very sharp when the nation was closed but now it is shooting up with the same pace.
Murky Politics In India
Coming to the point, hashtag #NationalUnemploymentDay was trending throughout the day of Prime Minister’s birthday. My attention was drawn to a very perplexing point- the hashtag #NationalUnemploymentDay was trending number one in Qatar and number 2 in UAE before it gained momentum in India. At a time when the hashtag was on top in the two conutries, it was infact out of the top 20 trends in India. It got 4.4 million tweets in no time in Qatar- the country whose total population is only 2.7 million. How on earth did it get 4.4 million tweets within hours? Twitter is obliged by all responsibility for fair use of its platform, to answer how it happened? This is the screenshot of trending issues in Qatar on September 17, 2020.
The following screenshot is taken a day after (while this article was underway). It illustrates the hashtag is still doing way better in Qatar and UAE than in India.
The evidences suggest that efforts were made from the middle east to push the fake narrative on social media to malign PM Modi on his birthday. 4.4 million tweets from a country of 2.7 million total population under one specific hashtag suggests that it was the job of a specifically developed twitter bot (also known as a web robot or digital robot which performs its task in absence of humans). Experts believe that several such consultancies are functioning in the middle east which can be hired for fake website traffic or tweets on twitter. However they failed to name any.
Congress role
If at all a consultancy was hired to do the job on Prime Minister’s birthday, who might have done this? Congress appears to be suspicious after its incredulous sullied role on twitter. Several verified accounts of congress and its leaders, including Rahul Gandhi, were seen pushing the hashtag so that it could trend in India. Many indirect supporters of congress such as Sagarika Ghosh, Kanhaiya Kumar etc helped the hashtag to fan out across the microblogging website, but they could not get much response from their own followers. In fact the number of retweets the hashtag received was amongst the lowest on their profiles. Their own fans virtually disappointed them. Following are the screenshots.
Why did they need to get the hashtag on top in other countries? Did they aim at making world’s number one hashtag of the day? What role did congress play in this notorious work? Twitter needs to answer. So far it appears that congress or some other opposition party did hire a consultancy from the middle east to gain political mileage in India.
