The Washington Post's 'politically correct' headline for the obituary of slain ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has dominated social media ever since it was published (and deleted) on Sunday.
In addition to generating outrage over the description of Baghdadi, as an “austere religious scholar...”, the Washington Post headline proved the inspiration to countless social media users to come up with their own versions of polite obituary headlines for notorious figures, who mostly died violently. The hashtag #WaPoDeathNotices has been trending on Twitter for close to 24 hours with both ordinary users and widely followed ones posting their own versions of popular figures.
On Monday, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor joined in and picked Nathuram Godse, the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi, as his subject. Tharoor tweeted, “Nathuram Godse, eloquent defender of majority rights, passes away in suspended animation at 39.” Godse was executed by hanging (hence the reference to suspended animation) in November 1949 for killing Gandhi.
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The Congress has frequently used Nathuram Godse to take jibes at the BJP, given decades of claims Godse was close to the RSS. During campaigning for the Maharashtra Assembly polls, Congress spokesman Manish Tewari asked why the BJP was not seeking the Bharat Ratna for Godse. The jibe came after the Maharashtra unit of the BJP said it would lobby for the Bharat Ratna to be awarded to Hindutva ideologue V.D. Savarkar, who also had been accused in Gandhi's assassination.
Tharoor's tweet on Godse was subjected to trolling, not surprisingly, by Twitter users who brought up the controversial circumstances regarding the death of Sunanda Pushkar, his third wife, in January 2014. Tharoor had been named as a suspect in the charge-sheet filed over Pushkar's death.