An earthquake was mentioned, and X became the epicentre of tremor-related wordplay, exposing the fault lines between two former colleagues.
The reply from Shashi Tharoor – Congress MP and one of social media’s favourite wordsmiths – was swift. Referencing the ongoing protests by the Opposition INDIA bloc, the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) and other groups, the MP from Thiruvananthapuram wondered whether the NDA was feeling the ground shake. It all began on Friday evening, when Rajya Sabha MP Milind Deora – who quit the Congress and joined the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena in 2024 – posted that it was good to be back in Panama, days after a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck the transcontinental country.
Tharoor said he was happy to know his former colleague had survived the tremors in Panama, and then sneaked in a jibe. When he resigned from the Congress in 2024, Deora called the party “suffocating and toxic” and said it was nothing like the organisation his father and former Union Minister Murli Deora had joined in 1968.
On Friday, the CJP had organised a march with the national flag at Connaught Place to protest the arrest of its spokespersons Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das, who had entered Jantar Mantar with the Tricolour after it was denotified as a protest site.
Last year, the MP, who is also a former Union Minister, slammed Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi for his claims of “vote chori” (theft) and said the Congress should address its own lack of internal democracy first.
CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke and All India Students’ Federation president Neha Bora, who has played a significant role in protests by the movement as well as the INDIA bloc, were detained before the march began.
