NEW DELHI: Election results may be good or bad for those politically-inclined depending on their party affiliation, but Twitterati across the spectrum are having a field day with catchy one-liners, jokes and memes all around, ranging from ‘Pappu pass ho gaya’ to the ‘BJP gets triple talaq’.
A good number of jokes are also targetted at Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who had campaigned extensively for the BJP during the elections. Several viral memes take a swipe at his numerous ‘name-changing’ ideas and one of those shows the firebrand leader telling Prime Minister Narendra Modi that he would change the meaning of ‘defeat’ to ‘victory’.
Another meme showed Adityanath, who had talked about changing the names of cities like Hyderabad during his election campaign, suggesting changing the name of Congress party itself to the ‘BJP’.
But, a tweet said it was time for Adityanath himself to again become ‘Ajay Singh Bisht’, his earlier name.
Divya Spandana of the Congress party’s social media team retweeted an old tweet of Modi from December 2003, wherein the then Gujarat chief minister had said that the results of five states showed the way the wind was blowing and it was beginning of ‘Congress-Mukt Bharat’, but she replaced the word ‘Congress’ with the ‘BJP’.
Celebrity author Shobhaa De tweeted, “Not only has Pappu passed, he has earned an instant PhD. Let’s hope he stays the course and doesn’t get distracted. India needs him to see the 2019 elections through.”
Actress Swara Bhasker tweeted, “Looks like BJP got ‘Pappu’d three times over”. Congress chief Rahul Gandhi is often referred to as ‘Pappu’ on social media by right-wing trolls, while some BJP leaders have also called him by this name.
Congress leader Shashi Tharoor said, “No wonder the BJP is so upset today. The voters just gave them a triple talaq”, referring to the Congress emerging victorious in Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.
He also referred to Madhya Pradesh Congress leader Kamal Nath’s statement that he was ensuring personal delivery of the party’s stake-claim letter to the state’s Governor, saying it was good that the party was not relying on the “Governor’s fax machine in MP”, taking a swipe at a recent fax machine controversy in Jammu and Kashmir.
Former J&K chief minister Omar Abdullah also tweeted that the Congress leaders in Madhya Pradesh were “smart people” as they were not faxing their letter to Raj Bhawan in Bhopal.
One of the viral memes blamed Yogi for the BJP losses and said it was his “caste certificate” to Lord Hanuman which hurt the party and the results are like a revenge by the monkey-god on Tuesday, a day when Hanuman is worshipped.
Former Uttar Pradesh chief minister and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav tweeted in Hindi, “Abki baar, kho di sarkar” (This time, lost the government), punning it on the popular BJP slogan of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, ‘Abki baar, Modi sarkar’. PTI