Days after filing a police complaint against BJP President J P Nadda, Union Minister Smriti Irani, spokesperson Sambit Patra and party functionary B L Santosh for spreading an alleged "fake" toolkit, the Congress on Thursday formally wrote to Twitter to remove their tweets and permanently suspend their accounts.
For the past three days, the Congress and BJP have engaged in a bitter war of words after BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra accused the Congress of preparing a toolkit to destroy Prime Minister Narendra Modi's image during the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
The BJP alleged that social media volunteers of the Congress were instructed to refer to the mutant virus as "Modi Strain" or the 'Indian Strain".
The Congress hit back with a police complaint against Mr. Patra and other top leaders for allegedly using a forged document to target the Congress. The Opposition party claimed that letter head of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) Research Department was forged from an actual document on the Central Vista project to prepare a fake document.
"As Twitter's own policy and rules seeks to discourage deceptive/ synthetic/ manipulated media that are likely to cause harm, we humbly request you to immediately remove the tweets contained in Annexure 1, or any other such material on the Twitter platform. Also, you are requested to kindly carry out a detailed probe on the subject-matter and permanently suspend the Twitter accounts of the above named individuals,"read the Congress complaint, filed by AICC research department head Rajeev Gowda and social media head Rohan Gupta.
Calling it a "pre-planned criminal conspiracy," the complaint mentioned that toolkit was prepared "with the clear intent to cause social unrest, communal disharmony in order to fuel hate and escalate violence in various parts of India".
