AAP leader Somnath Bharti who has a wide range of controversies to his name from allegations of domestic violence to being a spammer selling porn domains toilet found himself in the limelight again, when he sent out a tweet praising Prime Minister Modi for making it easier for the people to buy homes:
Soon, almost predictably, he proceeded to delete the tweet. While some alleged that AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal himself had called up Bharti and asked him to delete the tweet, Bharti claimed that his account was actually hacked when the tweet was pushed from his account:
friends, my account seems hacked, i m filing a police complaint n taking necessary actions to secure my account n deleting d pushed tweets.
— Adv. Somnath Bharti (@attorneybharti) February 13, 2017
Confirm news : @ArvindKejriwal called Somnath bharti to delete this tweet pic.twitter.com/FhPblzcQE1
— Tajinder Pal S Bagga (@TajinderBagga) February 13, 2017
People found it tough to believe that a hacker would just share a news article instead of tweeting something more scandalous. Say, something like ‘Modiji allows us to work, but we watch and make porn clips’ or ‘Kejriwal is coward and psychopath’.
Speculations that Kejriwal himself might have called up was inspired by an earlier event, when back in 2015, the then Arunachal CM Nabam Tuki was forced to delete his tweet praising the Centre, allegedly at the behest of Sonia Gandhi, after Congress suddenly decided to oppose the peace initiated by the Modi government:
Even if there was no call from Kejriwal, perhaps it made sense for Somnath Bharti to delete his tweet, because, as seen time and again, it can be very dangerous for non-BJP leaders to praise Narendra Modi.
Last year in November a leader at a BSP rally proceeded to praise PM Modi over demonetisation, only to see himself get into a scuffle where his mike was snatched. Others though have received harsher punishments; in 2009, a CPM MP was expelled for praising Modi, in 2013 Lalu’s estranged brother in law Sadhu Yadav was expelled from the Congress for praising Modi, in 2014 RJD had suspended a legislator for praising Modi, a JDU MLA was expelled and 2 MPs were suspended for the same, and the list goes on.
So almost invariably, praising Modi means public humiliation or a suspension/expulsion from your party. With Somnath Bharti belonging to a party whole supremo is a self-proclaimed arch nemesis of Modi, one can only imagine what fate awaited Somanth Bharti had he not deleted the tweet.
