A day after PM Modi addressed the Mann Ki Baat session on radio and urged people on Twitter to click and share selfies with their daughter, lakhs of people took to the microblogging site and uploaded their pictures with daughters. Though the hashtag #SelfieWithDaughter was on top of global trends but there were some opposing voices. Actor Shruti Seth and activist Kavita Krishnan were mocked and abused for their dissent against the PM’s campaign but what came as a haunting memory was Ehsan Jafri’s daughter Nishrin Jafri Hussain’s picture with her late father.
Nishrin shared a picture with her late father, along with a caption that was short, yet hard hitting. It read: “SelfieWithDaughter: This one will haunt him for ever.” Judging by the context of the whole episode, it was very clear to the audience on socialmedia about the person being referred to in the caption.
Ehsan Jafri was a former MP of the Congress party, who was brutally killed in the infamous Gulbarg society massacre in 2002 where 69 Muslims were killed by a Hindu mob. This and other sporadic communal riots were in the aftermath of the Godhra train burning incident. Ehsan Jafri’s widow Zakia Jafri said that the Gujarat police and the then CM Narendra Modi were complicit in the action by turning a blind eye to the riotous mob, which finally led to the death of the ex-MP. Later, the SIT probing the case gave a clean chit to Narendra Modi and the Gujarat state government.