Trolls followed by the Prime Minister another opportunity for blame game

Many right wing fanatics came out with celebratory abuses and accusations in response to Gauri Lankesh's murder and there was just one thing in common between all of them, they were all followed by the Prime Minister on Twitter.

A can of worms that the ruling party politicians and the Prime Minister rather have preferred to keep shut has opened up as the party is finding it tough to rein in the hyper nationalism that they incited, and the Left leaning Twitter janta was having none of it. A Twitter movement under the hashtag #BlockNarendraModi began to rise and quickly snowballed into a nationwide trend.

The BJP IT Cell supremo, Amit Malviya responded with a statement that has now also been posted on the official BJP Twitter handle wherein he says that the Prime Minister following someone is not a a character certificate and does not hold the Prime Minister responsible with regards to the behavior of that person. Although it could be said that the people you follow do reflect your thoughts, but that is the narrative the Bharatiya Janata Party and Amit Malviya are choosing to stick with.

Interestingly, Narendra Modi’s PMO handle only follows 1779 people and that many of them happen to be people whose choice of words are these. Personally, I find it exceedingly amusing that the team behind the PMO India Twitter handle is as good at scrutiny and research, as me working with a group of physicists on the Hadron collider.

#BlockNarendraModi was a response from the general public attempting to coax a reaction, a tweet or an explanation out of the Prime Minister as to why the most influential and one of the highest government office holders in the country follows common Twitter trolls hiding behind the distance, and sometimes anonymity between them and others.

Needless to say, the Indian National Congress did try to milk the entire fiasco into their pail of political gains by attacking the ruling party and specifically the person of interest, Narendra Modi. Their statement was in response to Amit Malviya’s statement with an attempt to use their words against them.