Soon after the historic Supreme Court verdict on the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid land title case on Saturday, Union Home Minister and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national president Amit Shah took to Twitter to welcome the judgement.
In a post in Hindi, Shah appealed to people from all communities to accept the judgement in a peaceful manner and uphold the principle of ‘One India-Great India’.
Social media was buzzing since Friday evening, the eve of the Supreme Court verdict on the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid land title case. Apart from heavy deployment of police personnel and imposing Section 144 that prohibits mass assembly of people, law enforcement officials have focused a good portion of its resources to monitor activities on social media to help contain the flow and spread of messages that are considered hateful, inciteful and communally sensitive.
“I wholeheartedly welcome the historic judgment of the Hon. Supreme Court. This has brought joy and relief to people of both communities from a long-standing dispute. #AYODHYAVERDICT,” posted Sr Sri Ravishankar, spiritual guru of the Art of Living foundation, who was part of the Ayodhya mediation panel.
“Thank you SC. Thank you to the entire Muslim community for your grace and generosity. Thank you to the Hindu community for their patience. India remains intact, as does the birthplace of Ram. Jai Shri Ram. #AyodhyaVerdict,” author Chetan Bhagat said in a post.
Social media was flooded with updates on the verdict with several people using the platform for meme’s while several others were seen making strong observations--some critical of the verdict while several others in praise.
Hastags like #BabriMasjid was trending on twitter with over 54700 mentions while #AYODHYAVERDICT has over 432, 000 mentions and #RamMandir at over 113000 mentions. There were at least 3290 tweets on the hashtag on the name of Ranjan Gogoi, the Chief Justice of India at the time of filing this report.
While there were about 37400 tweets with the hashtag #JaiShriRam while there were nearly 8000 mentions of Sunni Waqf board.
Hashtags seen to promote communal harmony like #hindumuslimbhaibhai saw over 31700 mentions, according to data on Twitter trends.
Since Friday night, messages on WhatsApp groups had started circulating on asking them to be on ‘admin only’ mode to prevent posting of objectionable matter ahead of and after the Ayodhya verdict. Various messages also did the rounds requesting users to avoid posting anything that would cause tension.
A man in Maharashtra’s Dhule district was arrested for writing an objectionable post on social media platform Facebook, on the eve of the Supreme Court verdict, a PTI report said. His post came to light when police teams were monitoring social media posts.
