Twitterati celebrate PM Modi’s birthday as National Unemployment Day

Prime Minister Narendra Modi received loads of good wishes from colleagues, partymen, politicians across political spectrum, media personalities and common men on his 71^st birthday on Friday.

However, millions of people also observed the day as National Unemployment Day in order to flag the issue of severe unemployment and remind PM Modi of his seemingly forgotten pre-poll promise of providing crores of jobs to the youth.

While the hashtag #HappyBdayModiji was among the top trending on Twitter on Friday, two more hashtags -- #NationalUnemploymentDay and #राष्ट्रीय_बेरोजगार_दिवस – were garnering more tweets than the former. At 3 PM on Friday, the hashtag National Unemployment Day had 1.12 million tweets while Rashtriya Berozgar Diwas had 1.58 million tweets.

The Happy Birthday hashtag had only clocked 523k tweets by this time, which is around five times less than the two unemployment day hashtags.

Twitter users shared stats, pictures and memes highlighting on the one hand the menace of unemployment that has acquired gigantic proportions over the last seven years, as well as the prime minister’s lack of concern over it on the other hand.

According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), more than 15 lakh people in the country lost their jobs in August this year in both the formal and informal sectors. That translates to a whopping 50,000 persons losing job each day.

According to CMIE, the national unemployment rate rose from 6.95% in July to 8.32% in August. For reference, the unemployment rate was 2.1% in 2011-12, that sharply rose to 6.1% in 2017-18 post-demonetisation and climbed to 8.32% last month.

The BJP had in its 2014 election manifesto promised 2 crore new jobs every year if it came to power. However, let alone creating new jobs, the Modi government’s faulty and ill-conceived policies resulted in massive bloodbath in the existing jobs itself. The informal sector almost collapsed in the wake of demonetisation while the formal sector suffered due to the implementation of poorly-designed Goods & Services Tax that was introduced with much fanfare in a midnight joint sitting of Parliament in 2017.

Apparently, what hurt the people the most is the government’s complete silence on the issue, while at the same time Finance Minister and other Union ministers aggressively defending the rise in fuel prices.

Instead of acknowledging unemployment as a problem – in other words a tale of its glaring failure on the economic front – the government has been belligerently trying to drown the voices through friendly media with news anchors shouting at Pakistan, Taliban, Muslims at the top of their voice.

Thousands of crores of taxpayers’ money are being recklessly splurged on government’s propaganda and publicity blitzkrieg despite the exchequer being far from the pink of its health.

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In a sight so common now, some TV anchors and journalists shared verbatim birthday wishes to the prime minister. No prizes for guessing that the messages had been sent to the anchors on their WhatsApp by “highly placed government sources”, with the instructions of sharing it on Twitter.

In summary, the prime minister’s 71^st birthday was celebrated with great pomp and show on social media. We wish our dear PM a happy birthday.