BJP on Sunday found itself on an incredibly defensive ground after it emerged that the company owned by the son of the saffron party’s chief, Amit Shah, had increased its wealth by 16,000 times since Narendra Modi became the prime minister in 2014.
The Congress wasted no time in seizing the opportunity to launch an all-out attack against the BJP. For Congress party, the timing of this revelation couldn’t have been more appropriate since Gujarat elections are just around the corner.
Senior Congress functionary and former HRD Minister, Kapil Sibal, addressed the media and demanded answers from Prime Minister Modi while asking for the matter to be probed by the Enforcement Directorate and CBI.
Soon, #AmitShahKiLoot became the top national trend on Twitter with users embarrassing the BJP. Many users and Congress supporters also sought to draw the attention of BJP leaders to their corruption allegations against Robert Vadra, the son-in-law of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, during the UPA regime.
BJP supporters too moved in swiftly to control the damage on the PR front and launched a counter hashtag #LiesAgainstShah. This too became a top trend in no time. However, Congress party alleged that the saffron party had used the paid trolls to copy and paste identical message to target the website and the journalist in question.
The identical tweet that was posted by 100s of users read, “Wire’s supari journalism has issues with legal businesses & spreads #LiesAgainstShah. And fake news specialist Rohini Singh hired for it.”
Many of the users who posted the identical message also included those, who are followed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They included users Neel Shah, Abhishek Mishra, Bharat Sanghvi and Rohit Chahal, whose Twitter bio describes him as the national media in-charge of BJP’s youth wing.
Many users alleged that the BJP had hired the services of paid trolls to counter the damaging PR on social media front.
Meanwhile, Amit Shah’s son has said he will file a Rs 100 crore defamation case against the journalist, editor and the website in question.