By Sandip Roy
Who knew that Sushma Swaraj had so many knights in shining armour, that too from the ranks of the Opposition? When the Union foreign minister returned from a seven-day tour of Europe earlier this week, she ran headlong into the Lucknow passport controversy.
Allegedly, a passport officer had misbehaved with a Hindu-Muslim couple. The upset couple tweeted at Swaraj in protest. A day later, the ministry handed over the passports. The officer was transferred. The officer had his side of the story claiming he was misrepresented. The couple had theirs. Whether Swaraj herself was personally involved is unclear.
But the storm troopers of Twitterverse unleashed their vitriol on the external affairs minister, whom they derisively nicknamed ‘Visa Mata’. She was abused. Her own kidney transplant was mocked as an ‘Islamic kidney’. Swaraj hit back, exposing some of the abusive handles by sharing some of the tweets she said she was “honoured with”. Her senior colleagues, even the ones normally vociferous on Twitter, suddenly found other very important things to tweet about. Their silence was deafening.
The Congress piped up, not entirely without glee, when it decided to “applaud” her decision to call out the “heinous trolls of [her] own party”. But this quickly also became a story of how the Union Cabinet was not standing up to defend the ‘honour of a woman minister’. Congress leader Sanjay Nirupam urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to “take action against such cyber criminals if he really believes in protecting the dignity of women”. His colleague, Randeep Singh Surjewala, pointed out that Modi follows some handles prone to trolling.
“And now through trolls, a lady minister and one of the most senior BJP leader is being harassed,” said Surjewala. Tweet as Screech It’s a fact that Twitter can be a toxic waste dump where trolls roam in swarms spoiling for a fight. And it’s also a fact that outspoken women online bear…
