Twitter abuzz with speculations over Vijay Mallya’s connection with Aakar Patel

Vijay Mallya and Aakar Patel

Amidst news that Vijay Mallya had refused to come back to India claiming that “time was not right” for him to return, Twitterverse was abuzz with speculations over what makes Mallya so well connected, enabling him to almost act with impunity.

While Mallya’s closeness with the political class is well known with him having friends in almost all political parties, many people on Twitter discovered yet another link of Mallya that makes the Bangalore based business tycoon “well connected”.

And this time the connection goes to the “civil society” and the journalists – who are supposed to be the “conscience keepers” of the society.

Mallya was found to be connected with Amnesty India’s Aakar Patel – who is also well known for writing casteist and anti-Modi articles, and thus is a celebrated writer among the “liberal” journalists – by virtue of Aakar Patel’s wife being Mallya’s political secretary.

Interestingly, the woman in question – Tushita Aakar Patel – has not explicitly mentioned that she was a secretary to Mallya. Instead, her twitter bio reads “personal assistant to a big businessman”. She is however followed by many journalists on Twitter with whom she regularly interacts.

Intrigued by this lack of disclosure, many Twitter users decided to dig further and they found the following pieces of information that once again confirm how well connected is the “ecosystem”:

https://twitter.com/rajudasonline/status/709054269459025921

https://twitter.com/RevolutionMonk/status/709043786668765185
Having someone as a personal or political secretary is not a crime, but what Twitter users found is that Aakar Patel was economical with disclosures when he wrote about Vijay Mallya e.g.

https://twitter.com/ARangarajan1972/status/709050843325014016

https://twitter.com/ARangarajan1972/status/709056457791016961

https://twitter.com/rupasubramanya/status/709038730896547840
and a riddle 🙂

https://twitter.com/jgopikrishnan70/status/708945200891056128

OpIndia Staff: Staff reporter at OpIndia