Twitter fans of PM Modi viciously troll a shocked Sushma Swaraj

Sushma Swaraj returned to India from a week-long trip to Europe to find her Twitter account deluged with hateful tweets as Twitter handles—many of them describing themselves as fans and supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi—vented their ire at her. The vicious trolls were angry that a Passport Officer in Lucknow, Vikas Mishra, who allegedly discriminated against a Hindu-Muslim couple, was initially transferred to Gorakhpur after the couple tweeted about their harrowing experiencing at his hands, when applying for a passport.

So shocked was Swaraj that she ‘liked’ the tweets in order to share with the world, the vile abuse directed her way by vicious trolls on Twitter. ‘Liking’ a tweet is sometimes used for expressing approval of the content of a tweet; however, it is also regularly used a way to bookmark tweets for later reference or to highlight it, as Swaraj as done.

“I was out of India from 17th to 23rd June 2018. I do not know what happened in my absence. However, I am honoured with some tweets. I am sharing them with you. So I have liked them,” said the External Affairs minister.

Sushma returns to a stream of hate-filled tweets in her mentions

Here follows a sampling of some the tweets External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj wanted to share with the world. While National Herald as a policy does not publish abusive tweets, since the External Affairs minister wants the abuse she has been subjected to, to be publicly known, we are reproducing some of them here. We are also doing so in the hope that criminal action is taken against these accounts. Troll accounts abuse and harass liberal and secular voices on Indian Twitter on a daily basis. If they can openly abuse India’s External Affairs minister and get away with it, there is no hope of online safety for the rest of us.

Sushma Swaraj gets rush of support on Twitter

Plenty of people on Twitter, many of them troll targets themselves, came to the External Affairs Minister’s support and slammed the abusers who trolled Sushma Swaraj.

Swaraj’s criticism on the social networking platform seems to have been sparked by unconfirmed reports about Mishra being called back to Lucknow, after it reportedly emerged that Tanvi may have been carrying another passport bearing her Muslim name. According to sources, the MEA is now investigating whether Tanvi was in possession of more than one passport.

During the heated exchange between Tanvi and Mishra on Wednesday, June 20, Mishra is, however, said to have been guilty of making inflammatory remarks on her religion.

*This article was updated at 7.14 am on June 25, 2018to add the Congress party’s tweet