Sushma ka Swaraj!

A nationalist leader who wants to tweet her way into media consciousness

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Sushma Swaraj has discovered what’s more in vogue than being a fiery orator—being on Twitter. So there she was on Twitter last month, announcing her arrival and using the social networking site to make her point in less than 140 characters. Swaraj opened her account on 25 November and already has a few thousand followers. She says she means to keep in touch regularly with the twitterati and sounds pretty serious about it too. A day after she started tweeting, she put on record the fact that she had recorded her dissent on the appointment of PJ Thomas as India’s new Chief Vigilance Commissioner. In another tweet, she took a dig at Congress MPs’ sacrifice of their Parliament daily allowance: ‘Congress MPs decision to forgo Rs 2,000 allowance is ‘prayshchit’ for CWG and 2G scam.’

On 30 November, she addressed a press conference in Parliament and distributed copies of her dissent note. “You already know of this through Twitter,” she announced, making it amply clear that scribes who want to know her mind had better follow her on Twitter. Swaraj is fast learning from her cyber experience. Last week, after she tweeted: ‘Arun Jaitley has my unstinted support as Karnataka Prabhari. I am sure he will be able to set things right in Karnataka,’ a follower actually asked her: ‘you mean it?’ Swaraj tweeted the same day: ‘For media my twitter account is @BJPsushmaswaraj.’ She has since created a separate account for journalists. About three dozen journalists follow her. She also takes questions from them on a daily basis. That makes her the first major leader of a national-level political party to start a Q&A service for journalists via the American run site. Swaraj has taken to tweeting like a canary takes to singing. Wonder if more politicians will follow suit.

About The Author

Jatin Gandhi

Jatin Gandhi has covered politics and policy for over a decade now for print, TV and the web. He is Deputy Political Editor at Open.