Foreign minister Sushma Swaraj has massively trolled the Congress Party on Twitter, showing the party its place. On Monday morning, the Congress party continued to politicize the death of 39 Indians in Iraq. They posted a question from their official handle asking people whether these deaths in Iraq were the biggest failure of the foreign minister, giving people the options of answering with either a yes or a no.
Do you think the death of 39 Indians in Iraq is Sushma Swaraj’s biggest failure as Foreign Minister? #IndiaSpeaks
— Congress (@INCIndia) March 26, 2018
Sushma Swaraj caught wind of this tweet, and promptly retweeted it from her own handle. Perhaps she too wanted to know if people considered this to be her biggest failure or not.
In any case, such a retweet by Sushma Swaraj also gave the Congress Party an opportunity to have the question answered from a larger and more unbiased audience, considering it would have only reached the Congress Party’s followers on Twitter without her retweet. There are several allegations that a large part of the Congress Party’s following on Twitter is made up of bots who function at the party’s bidding. The foreign minister’s retweet reduced the risk of rendering an important tweet of such national relevance into an online echo-chamber of sorts.
The results of this poll are astounding. They are astounding not because they reflect ground realities accurately, but because of the scale at which the Congress Party got an unfavorable result from its own handle. Of the 33,879 people who took part in the poll, a whopping 76 percent voted no, indicating that they did not consider it to be a failure.
This is not the first time that the Congress has eaten crow on Twitter. Time and again, polls conducted by the party’s official handle have been retweeted by handles on the other side of the political divide. This has democratized the party’s polls, and many a times, it has produced hilarious results which the party certainly didn’t wish for. The handle has become a laughing stock for those on the other side of the aisle, especially because questions posed by the handle have often been drafted in a suicidal manner. The allegations of employing bots, using dubious firms such as Cambridge Analytica, and stealing data, have plagued the party and its social media strategy of late. Amidst allegations of data theft, the Congress Party was forced to take down one of its apps from the Google Playstore on Monday.
Several leaders of the Congress Party criticized the government after the foreign minister announced that the 39 Indians held captive in Iraq were no more. They claimed that the government, by delaying the announcement, had given false hope to the families of the victim. They could not get around to understanding the simple fact that the deaths of people cannot be announced prematurely, not unless the government was one hundred percent sure about it. Or perhaps they did, but they simply couldn’t refuse the temptation of scoring political brownie points, even if it meant scoring them over the dead-bodies of fellow countrymen.
