Shoot Kashmiris': Digital India's tweet to Army comes to bite back ministry
The tweet had screenshots of a poem urging high-handedness by the Army, with caption Heights of Patriotism'.
New Delhi: The Centre, on Friday, found itself in deep waters, after the Twitter page of Digital India, a flagship program of the Modi government, praised a poem calling for the killing of Kashmiris by the Indian Army.
The tweet read a poem urging high-handedness by the Army, with the caption ‘Heights of #Patriotism’. It was soon deleted, but managed to kick up a storm online.
“Issued in public interest; all who love their lives; should quietly come to the city square; sing the national anthem; and not throw any tantrums here,” one of the lines of the poem read.
“The bullets have just started, don’t say later you didn’t get a warning, you will have to say Vande Mantaram every morning,” one of the lines read, while another read, “Thrash them all you want, army; break their bones; If Mehbooba calls the police; Modi will handle it.”
Thrown into crisis management, authorities asserted that the tweet did not reflect the views of the government, and that the social media accounts of Digital India project is outsourced to private firm, Veritone.
Regretting the incident, IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told The Indian Express, “The contents of the tweet don’t represent the views of the IT ministry, Digital India or the government of India.” He added that an immediate enquiry has been ordered into the incident, and the concerned employee has been suspended.
S Radha Chauhan, CEO of National e-Governance Division, which heads the Digital India project, said that the employee concerned had posted the poem on the Digital India page by mistake instead of his personal page.
The tweet came into focus after AAP leader Ankit Lal pointed it out in Twitter.
He wrote “Govt verified handle @_DigitalIndia finds poem calling fr mass murder of Kashmiris "Height of Patriotism"#Shame!”
In a similar incident, All India Radio was caught in a raging row last week after one of its employees posted comments critical of Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on its official Twitter page.