Is Arvind Kejriwal saluting PM for surgical strikes, or is there more?
When Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal posted a video message on social media, it created a major flutter. The video, 2 minutes and 52 seconds in duration, had him talking about the Uri terror attack and then the surgical strike carried out by the Indian Army.
Kejriwal praised the willpower of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and saluted him. His message stunned the BJP, as the AAP chief has always been at loggerheads with the PM and never shied away from deriding him in public.
In a matter of minutes, the video message drew retweets on Twitter, with several commentators seeing Kejriwal as bending before public opinion and being forced to salute the PM.
But is it really so? A closer look at the video reveals a different story. Had it indeed been a congratulatory message, Kejriwal would have restricted himself to just a salute or words of praise for the martyrs, but he did not do just that.
He was through with the salutation to the PM and other stuff in the first 40 second of the video, and devoted full two minutes to talk about how Pakistan has been able to cast aspersions on the Indian narrative by using the international press.
Using the ruse of BBC, CNN and The New York Times, Kejriwal exhorted the PM to expose the Pakistani agenda. In other words, he has asked the PM to share evidence or make public the “video” of the surgical strike across the LoC.
The intent of the video message can be traced back to the Delhi CM's recent tweets and retweets, which mainly pertain to asking the government to effectively counter the Pakistani propaganda. And in one retweet of his, the way to counter propaganda from across the border is to release the video of the strike.
Kejriwal even seems to be insinuating that no such strike took place. In his video message, he says that two days ago, the UN said they had not seen any such (strike) activity on the LoC. He talks about how Pakistan is taking global media reporters to the strike area and showing them how life is normal there, with kids playing around. Thus, the AAP chief says, Modi should counter these lies.
The video message took the BJP by surprise and the first 40 seconds of the video were enough to gladden their hearts. Several commentators as well as supporters saw the video as validation of the fact that Kejriwal was forced to salute the PM.
A BJP leader even said: “See, finally this man too had to acknowledge the superiority of Narendra Modi's leadership.”
It was a while before the import of the full video dawned on them, and then most of them avoided commenting on it.
A senior BJP leader after watching the full video agreed that in the garb of saluting Modi, the message was basically an attempt to doubt the government's surgical strike narrative - and since raising questions directly about the strike may not have gone down well with the masses, Kejriwal had questioned the strike indirectly.