When Subramanian Swamy trolled his own daughter

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy’s Twitter feed is a joy to behold. Laced with spite and clunky acronyms, with the occasional whiff of bigotry and conspiracy theories, Swamy’s tweets have made headlines, most recently for targeting the outgoing governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Raghuram Rajan.
But the routinely on-target Swamy seems to have missed his mark for once. Yesterday, Swamy retweeted an article on “UPA and Media Cronyism”, published on the website jansatyagrah.in.

The piece, which talks about media contingents accompanying the previous PM Manmohan Singh’s foreign trips, mentions Swamy’s daughter Suhasini Haidar as one of the journalists “who have enjoyed a lot the abroad trips of PM”. A picture of Haidar with other journalists, seemingly aboard Air India One (the PM’s official airplane), also went out with the tweet. The article insinuates that the practice of media contingents promotes “cronyism”.

Realising his folly, Swamy immediately tweeted a spirited defence of his daughter, saying that “I brought her up to be fearless” and that “she is nobody’s crony”.

As expected, folks on Twitter pounced on the opportunity to have a few laughs at Swamy’s expense.