Anti-Modi tweets: BJP's 'Silencer' moment

Ten years after Bollywood director Rajkumar Hirani created that iconic scene in the film "3 Idiots," where Chatur (nicknamed "Silencer") reads out a text secretly edited by Rancho at a Teachers Day celebration, much to the disappointment of the principal "Virus", something similar unfolded for some of the top BJP leaders in the country on Wednesday.

There was no Omi Vaidya ("Silencer"), Aamir Khan (Rancho) or Boman Irani ("Virus") in this script played out on Twitter, but it did involve some of the top leaders of the ruling party, including Union Minister Pon Radhakrishnan. Here "chamatkar" did not become "balatkar", but sentences like "PM Modi took care of the needs of marginalized" started reading as "PM Modi took care of the needs of richest".

All this happened because, according to AltNews co-founder Pratik Sinha, someone edited a Google Doc circulated by the BJP's IT cell. The Google Doc circulated by the BJP's IT cell was used for framing and circulating messages that were then posted by a host of handles, including Union Ministers.

"How do you get a Union Minister to tweet what you want? Well, you go and edit the trending document made by BJP IT cell, and then you control what they tweet," Sinha explained.

A tweet that went out from Pon Radhakrishnan's Twitter handle read as "working for the middle class is low on the agenda of Modi govt..." The same tweet was sent out by several Twitter handles linked to the BJP.

"Modi govt has not made inclusive development as the focal point of its functioning..." was another tweet sent out from the Union Minister's Twitter handle as well as that of the BJP's Assam unit, among hundreds of others.

"While it might seem like a laughing matter, the purpose here is to demonstrate that a non-government entity sitting in BJP's office is controlling what a Union Minister is tweeting," Sinha said in a tweet.

The embarrassing tweets appear to have been removed from the Twitter handles concerned but the screenshots of the tweets are available at various platforms.