A slip of tongue! Really? One gaffe after another on public platform and political rallies was a norm for the Congress leadership from 2014 to 2017. The butt of jokes and memes on the leadership of the grand old party was a regular feature on social media. The RW twitteratis had a field day almost every single day.
Come 2017, things started to look different for the Congress party. The Social Media presence of the party graduated leaps and bounds. The SM soldiers have taken the fight to opposition camp, quite literally. They now have started beating them at the game, which the BJP and later AAP mastered.
The team is as good as its leader! There is a newfound spike in Rahul Gandhi’s tweets. The tweets are getting good traction among twitteratis and are being liked and re-twitted more, than it was before 2017.
March 27, was another field day for twitteratis. Two inadvertent gaffes in public by BJP national president Amit Shah and Dharwad MP Prahlad Joshi set a day of embarrassment for the saffron party. The Congress, setting off a gleeful deluge on Twitter, happily grabbed the opportunities to score political brownie points.
Addressing media persons during his tour of Lingayat and Dalit mutts in Central Karnataka, Shah trained his guns against the Siddaramaiah government. “Recently, a retired Supreme Court judge said if ever there was a competition for the most corrupt government, then the Yeddyurappa government will get number one position,” he said, shocking Yeddyurappa who was seated next to him. Prahlad Joshi immediately whispered into Shah’s ear “Siddaramaiah government.”
Embarrassed and stunned Yeddyurappa also reminded Shah that he should have said, “Siddaramaiah government was number one in corruption.”
Realising his gaffe, Shah corrected himself, “Arre re… Siddaramaiah government is number one in corruption.”
Quick to cash in on to Shah’s faux pas, Congress President Rahul Gandhi tweeted, “Now that the BJP IT cell has announced Karnataka polls, time for a sneak preview of our top secret campaign video! Gifted to us by the BJP President, our campaign in Karnataka is off to a fabulous start. He says Yeddyurappa ran the most corrupt Govt ever… True.”:
Now that the BJP IT cell has announced Karnataka elections, time for a sneak preview of our top secret campaign video!
Gifted to us by the BJP President, our campaign in Karnataka is off to a fabulous start. He says Yeddyurappa ran the most corrupt Govt ever…
True. pic.twitter.com/UYqGDZuKyR
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 27, 2018
This slip by Shah will surely be a subject of debate, if it really was a faux paus or a deliberate utterance to keep a check on the powerful Lingayat leader. Some have even started citing it to be a parapraxis that has much to reveal on a repressed motive of a party (BJP) coming to the fore prematurely by none other than the Party President.
A close look at recent history raises an eyebrow, BJP wave which swept Himachal Pradesh could not help their CM designate and two of his closest confidant (one, father in law of his Son and the other, state party president) to victory. Knowing how paranoid Yeddyurappa can be, it won’t be a surprise if he isn’t convinced Amit Shah’s faux paus was a slip of the tongue and not a parapraxis.
Later in the day, it was the Joshi’s turn; he ended up wrongly translating Shah’s speech from Hindi into Kannada. Shah launched an attack against Siddaramaiah again for not doing anything for the SC/ST communities in the state, which was translated by Joshi as “PM Modi did not do anything for the SC/STs.”
As the election season hots up, the SM space will be the actual battleground for politicking and political one-upmanship. A journalist had recently tweeted “Earlier Elections were fought on the ground and now they are fought on the keyboard.”
Disclaimer: The information, ideas or opinions appearing in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of N4M Media.
