It has become a 'regular' occurrence to see #GoBackModi trend on Twitter whenever the prime minister is in Tamil Nadu. This time, Twitter is abuzz with the hashtag #GoBackModi in English, Tamil and Chinese. At a time when the rest of India was busy wishing Amitabh Bachchan on his birthday, Tamil Nadu was witnessing a weird drama.
Ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit, the Twitter trend was evident as Modi landed in Chennai to reach the Taj Fishermen's Cove hotel and then proceeded to Mamallapuram to receive his Chinese guest. At 2pm as Xi landed in Chennai, #GoBackModi had been trending on Twitter with more than 1,47,000 tweets; the first topic in the trends list remained #HappyBirthdayAmitabh.
But when India is looked at with a lens by the entire international community, as several bilateral issues and trade relationships are to be discussed by Modi and Xi at Mamallapuram, the Twitter trend could send a wrong message to the international community, about Modi’s leadership. The trend has picked up in Chinese as well. Twitteratti are tweeting 'Hui dao modi' in Chinese. The trend began early on Thursday evening, at least 14 hours before Modi landed in Chennai.
This is not the first time #GoBackModi is trending on Twitter. The hashtag first trended on Twitter on April 2, 2018, when Modi came to Chennai during his first term as prime minister to inaugurate the Defence Expo at Thriuvidanthai. It was then the opposition parties took to black flag protests and released black balloons to embarrass the prime minister.
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Since then, it has become a practice in Tamil Nadu to tweet #GoBackModi. In January this year, when Modi landed at Madurai to lay the foundation stone for a AIIMS campus there, #GoBackModi was the top trend on Twitter. Again, on September 30, when Modi visited Chennai to take part in the IIT convocation ceremony, #GoBackModi trended on Twitter. As he spoke about South Indian breakfast like idli and dosa, Tamil Twitterati tweeted #GoBackModi images in the form of a dosa on a tawa.
While the BJP IT cell and RSS sympathisers brush off the #GoBackModi offensive, saying that it is being peddled by the opposition, the hashtag trend this time seems to reflect the mood of the people in the state. This time though the opposition parties chose to stay away, the hashtag trended in three languages from numerous handles in and around Tamil Nadu.
