The Indian National Congress promoted hashtags #IndiaOnSale, #dalalpm and #Stopsellingindia on August 25,2021 to spread awareness and to question the BJP on new financial decisions made by their government. Thousands of citizens tweeted these hashtags however they were infiltrated by Pakistani accounts to further push their own agendas as well.

The central government of India has planned to raise 6 trillion rupees ($81 billion) from selling state-owned infrastructure assets over next four years to help strengthen the government’s finances and replenish its budget deficit.

The plan includes sale of road and railway assets, airports, power transmission lines and gas pipelines. The government has budgeted close to 1.75 trillion rupees in sales till 2022 to make up for the loss in revenue that occurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This move prompted a nationwide response from citizens who questioned the need of the central government to privatize key segments of public amenities. This eventually led to hashtags that trended on twitter at the number 1 spot namely #IndiaOnSale followed by #dalalpm and #Stopsellingindia.

These three hashtags were used by social media users to amplify their rage on this topic and here we present an analysis of the same.

Focal points of the analysis:

• Total Pakistani handles within the hashtag: 793
• Total number of tweets within #IndiaOnSale & #dalalpm : 38,800 times
• Top handles tagged were rahulgandhi, narendramodi and incindia
• Accounts with immense following who engaged with the hashtag : RahulGandhi, INCIndia and yadavtejhasvi

Data analysis:

• Tweets Timeline:

The tweets within #IndiaOnSale & #dalalpm peaked highest on 25^th Aug 2021 with almost 20k tweets.

• WorldCloud of the tweets:

As noticed in previous hashtag analysis done by us, trending hashtags tend to use similar words in their tweets which is indicative of the tone of the tweets.

Here is a wordcloud of #IndiaOnSale & #dalalpm hashtags in hindi:

Here is a wordcloud of those who tweeted in English.

• Top accounts who used the two hashtags maximum number of times:

Often times in order to get the hashtag to trend, certain accounts retweet the hashtag hundreds of times, the top accounts who tweeted maximum number of times are vermadaksha2000, tasilommat and arungan43282191 followed by others. These accounts tweeted the hashtags upwards of 300 times each during the course of one day.

• Twitter handles who were mentioned in the tweets:

Top accounts that got mentioned were rahulgandhi, narendramodi and incindia with 994, 505 and 319 tags respectively.

• Hashtags used in tweets:

The top hashtags also give us a clue as to the sentiments displayed within the tweets. The top hashtags used in the trend were #Indiaonsale, #dalalpm and #Stopsellingindia. #Indiaonsale was used 32.3k times, #dalalpm was used 5.2k times and #Stopsellingindia was used 1.3k times.

• Bubble plot of top verified accounts:

Top verified accounts who got involved with these hashtags were RahulGandhi, INCIndia and yadavtejhasvi with 19.5M, 8.48M and 3.51M followers on twitter.

The infiltration by Pakistani accounts:

The most baffling fact that came up with our search was that several Pakistani accounts tweeted within this hashtag. These tweets added a significant volume to the total number of tweets made in the hashtag. Some examples of the tweets posted by these Pakistani accounts are mentioned below.

• Pakistani accounts that tweeted the most:

The hashtags were used the most by ayazahmad38  who tweeted the hashtags 35 times. The following graph is a visual represent of who tweeted the hashtags the most.

• Pakistan accounts that retweeted the most:

The hashtags were retweeted the most by NaziaShakeel12 who retweeted the hashtags 20 times. Attached graph below shows the number of retweets done by the Pakistani accounts.

• Top Pakistani accounts who tweeted were ansaarmy, AmbreenPTI1 and UmarHayatBajwa with 146.42k, 100.82k and 100.07k twitter followers respectively.

• Graph of most words used in Tweets made by Pakistani users:

Here is a bar graph of words frequency made using the tweets sent out by the Pakistani users.

Conclusion:

The main reason why this hashtag was used was for social media users to express the fact that privatization would perhaps open doors to monopolies that will be created. They believe that this would kill jobs, eliminate the informal sector and will eventually lead to closure of small businesses. But our hashtag analysis proves that the hashtags were used by Pakistani users to push their own agenda. The hashtag analysis provides a method to look at just who influenced the masses and how much of it was individualized rage.