Online sparring between the Madhya Pradesh BJP and Congress units has escalated, with the Congress conducting an online survey on Twitter on ‘most corrupt leader’ and coming up with results on Thursday showing 50 per cent votes for Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and 34 per cent for Union Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia.
The online poll comes two days after the BJP’s social media cell conducted a poll, also on Twitter, giving options for Kamal Nath's replacement as state Congress chief. The official Twitter handle of the MP BJP announced the results with 60 per cent votes to former minister Jitu Patwari.
The counter online polls come within 10 days after the social media cells of the two parties had an online spat over the number of fake followers. The MP BJP had launched the offensive on June 28, with its state IT cell chief Shivraj Dabi sharing an analysis by a website that purportedly showed 48 per cent of Congress Twitter followers as fake.
The Congress has a considerably higher number of Twitter followers—more than nine lakh—than BJP—over seven lakh. The Congress Twitter handle followers’ number surpassed BJP’s handle last year after the Congress government was felled in the state, and has grown since.
To counter BJP's claim, the Congress online team led by its chief Abhay Tiwari released data from the same website as used by BJP to claim that while 86 per cent of Congress followers on Twitter were real, BJP had only 62 per cent real followers. The Congress IT cell went a step forward releasing data from the same website to claim that 65.5 per cent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s, 55.9 per cent of Home Minister Amit Shah’s and 53.9 per cent of CM Chouhan’s followers were fake.
The online war was taken forward by the BJP that posted a poll on replacement of MPCC chief Nath. The poll garnered only 1,278 votes—60 per cent went to Patwari, 27 per cent to ex-minister Jaiwardhan Singh and 13 per cent to senior leader and ex-minister Sajjan Singh Verma.
The Congress again struck back on July 7 with an online poll giving four options for ‘most corrupt leader’ including Chouhan, Scindia, national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya and state BJP president Vishnu Dutt Sharma. The survey result shared on Thursday showed 15,184 users having participated in the poll with Vijayvargiya getting around 11 per cent and Sharma around 5 per cent of votes.
