New Delhi:
An earthquake was mentioned, and X became the epicentre of tremor-related wordplay, exposing the fault lines between two former colleagues.
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.
"Another tremor or two made their presence felt while I was there. Thankfully, Panama and I are both safe!" the MP wrote.
The reply from Shashi Tharoor - Congress MP and one of social media's favourite wordsmiths - was swift. Tharoor said he was happy to know his former colleague had survived the tremors in Panama, and then sneaked in a jibe. 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.
"Reassuring to know that our friends are doing well, @milinddeora, and that you have survived the tremors in Panama! Your allies may be feeling the ground shaking beneath their feet here in India though..." he wrote.
Not to be outdone, Deora brought up tectonic shifts, asking whether Opposition parties had been jolted by movements like the CJP, which threatened to erode their popularity.
"I suspect you're referring to new entrants triggering tectonic shifts in the Opposition's established pecking order?" the Shiv Sena MP posted, throwing in a winking emoji for good measure.
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.
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.
Hitting The Streets
Delhi and other parts of the country have seen protests by the INDIA bloc and CJP demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over allegations of unilateral functioning and irregularities in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
The latest round of protests was triggered by a report stating that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had raised questions about the SIR and other issues, but their concerns were not heard.
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. 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.