Arun Jaitley made Twitter home to connect with people
New Delhi: Arun Jaitley who joined Twitter in November 2013 and had 15.3 million followers on the day of his demise, used the micro-blogging platform to not only connect with the masses but also respond to some of the most burning issues the country faced in the last six years.
Jaitley garnered more than 3,000 followers in just hours of signing up on Twitter on November 27, 2013.
His first tweet came on December 5: “It gives me great pleasure to join this vibrant forum for sharing my views and interacting with you all”.
Once the greetings were done, Jaitely was bang on target with his next tweet: “Nawaz Sharif is talking of a 4th war over Kashmir. So far Pakistan wanted terror & talks to coexist. Now will War & Talks coexist?”
In the next six years, the former Finance Minister tweeted on a variety of subjects that were close to the hearts of millions of people.
“From gloom & doom driven by policy paralysis of the UPA, we have made India in the last 5 years the fastest growing economy in the world,” was one of his tweets.
Jaitley understood the sanctity of the platform and was never part of unnecessary mud-slinging on opposition leaders, and tried to stick to facts while sending out posts.
“We envision four priority areas for expenditure in New India – national security, health, education & infrastructure development,” he tweeted once.
Jaitley always tweeted in both English and Hindi to have a wider reach.
“Today there is no ‘gathbandhan’ let alone ‘mahagathbandhan’. It is a ‘non-bandhan’. They have no leader, no programme, no meeting of minds. Stability, which is paramount, is a major casualty. One thing is common i.e. a negative agenda ‘remove one man’. It is a recipe for chaos,” he tweeted on “failed” efforts of the Opposition to create an alliance against Prime Minister Narendra Modi before the 2019 general election.
“There are some in the political system who thought that they were born to rule. Some who were part of the ideological left & the ultra-left obviously found the NDA Govt. wholly unacceptable. Hence emerged a new class of Compulsive Contrarians, who run perpetual propaganda,” Jaitley took on Congress.
“People are more intelligent than what politicians may think. They never choose chaos as an option. Aspirational society never commits collective suicide as they do not suffer from a Lemming Syndrome. People want a 5-year government, not a 6-month one,” he posted.
During his active Twitter life, he was always to-the-point – like in his real life – and avoided getting into controversies – even during the heated social media debates on demonetization and GST.
“The future vision is to make India a Five Trillion Dollar economy. By the middle of the next decade we will achieve this and thereafter, target doubling that size of the economy,” Jaitley once tweeted.
“Do not give an impression to the world that India is divided on how to fight terrorism. When the world is rallying around India, the Opposition in India should not be striking a discordant note,” he advised the Opposition.
His tweets may have fallen silent, but his followers will always remember him as someone who kept a clean social media profile, educating them all along the way.
Published on: Aug 24, 2019 at 16:17 IST
IANS
