Today I noticed something odd from the handle of @narendramodi. Multiple tweets were fired about “Bhagwan Basaveshwara” and very conveniently a statue of his was found to garland in England! I couldn’t help but wonder if this devotion was due to the upcoming elections in Karnataka in a month from now.
So I went looking for tweets mentioning ‘basava’ and it’s variations from 4 prominent personalities – @narendramodi, @rahulgandhi, @BSYBJP and @siddaramaiah – from 01-03-2010 to 19-04-2018. The tweets can be accessed here.
But first, a quick note on when they joined twitter – hence, technically since when they had an opportunity to talk about Basava on the platform. Siddaramaiah joined in July 2017 while Rahul Gandhi was on the platform from April 2015 having changed over from the handle @officeofrg to the new one on Mar 17, 2018. B.S. Yeddyurappa joined twitter July 2009 and Narendra Modi was the grand veteran of twitter having joined in January 2010.
It was entirely quiet till 2014 since when 49 tweets were fired by these four. Yeddyurappa tweeted 28 times and Narendra Modi 12 times. In comparison, the Congress folks were tweeted only 9 times.
These are the key entities in their tweets (run through Google NLP API).
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- Narendra Modi: The reverence was clear for “Bhagwan Basaveshwara” between talk about events he participated in and the philosophy of Basava.
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- Yeddyurappa: The reverence was as much for Modi as it was for Basava! Then it was all about events he was participating in. And yes there was a bit of trolling of an opposition party and its leader.
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- Siddaramaiah: Mocking Modi multiple times for talking about Basava, he chose to talk about aspirations of Kannadiga’s and what he has done according to the philosophy of Basava.
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- Rahul Gandhi: Just a couple of tweets given the occasion.
