For most of the morning hashtag Gandhi Jayanti lorded over the site, by 5 PM pro-Godsehashtags started showing up. So, while America’s prestigious newspaper, the New York Times carries an article on Gandhi penned by Modi, RSS affiliates and their members –hard core members of the ABVP among others– praised his assassin.
On the 150th birth anniversaryof Mahatma Gandhi, a hashtag by ‘followers’ and ‘admirers’ of his assassin NathuramGodse also trended on Twitter. For much of the morning, the hashtag Gandhi Jayanti lorded over the microblogging site with over 114k tweets. Several other hashtags like Mahatma Gandhi and Gandhi at 150 were also floated.
However, by 5 PM, pro-Godsehashtags started to rise up on Twitter trends. The most prominent hashtag eulogizing Gandhiji’s assassin was #Godse_Amar_Rahethat trended with nearly 20k tweets.
While Brand India has been synonymous with Gandhi, it came as a shocker to see that while w#GandhiJayanti was trending worldwide, the troll army of BJP, paradoxically, came out in support of his assassin, NathuramGodse. What was as shocking was the fact that it were affiliates of the parent organization that prime minister, NarendraModi owes allegiance to, that was clearly behind the pro-Godse tweets.
On studying their profiles, we found that these users were mostly rightwing supremacists who are a part of the RashtriyaSwayamSevakSangh (RSS), the AkhilBharatiyaVidyarthiParishad (ABVP), theBharatiyaJanata Youth Morcha (BJYM) and in their own words ‘kattar Hindus’.
It is ironical that on the 150th birth anniversary of the most important man in India, the troll army orchestrated the move of trending the hashtag about NathuramGodse. On the one hand when PM Modi was paying obeisance to Gandhiji at Rajghat, the rightwing army of organizations associated with BJP tried to put forward their agenda of Hindutva by claiming that Godse was true Hindu. So, while America’s prestigious newspaper, the New York Times carries an article on Gandhi penned by Modi, RSS affiliates and their members praised his assassin.
Is the BJP then just paying lip service to Gandhiji and his ideals? Are the affiliates of the National party spreading their communal agenda of ‘Hindutva’ under the garb of promoting ‘Hinduism’?