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Online campaign in B’luru takes on ‘hate politics’
A select group of individuals in Bengaluru on Sunday launched a social media campaign to smother out any politics or fueling of hate during the pandemic and instead focus on providing aid and relief
A select group of individuals in Bengaluru on Sunday launched a social media campaign to smother out any politics or fueling of hate during the pandemic and instead focus on providing aid and relief.
The campaign #NammooraEllaruNammavaru (everyone in our city is our people), which has seen a significant amount of response online, is being used even by legislators with hashtags like #HatespeechbeDa (no hate speech), which was posted on Twitter on Sunday by Sowmya Reddy, the Congress legislator from Jayanagar assembly constituency.
The campaign kicks off days after Bengaluru South member of parliament, Tejasvi Surya and at least three other legislators from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)--Satish Reddy, Ravi Subramanya and Uday Garudachar--barged into the war room in the south zone and made communally provocative comments against Muslims working there.
Though Surya claimed to have entered the war room to expose a huge “bribe for bed scam”, the entire episode was alleged to have a communal twist as the BJP MP named 16 Muslims working in the facility. Subramanya, also Tejaswi’s uncle, questioned if the war room was a “madarasa”.
“We are working together without looking at caste creed, oxygen, bed booking, cremation, food. Politicians are trying to fuel hate. We do not want hate, we want oxygen. We do not want dirty politics, we want hospital beds,” Vinay Sreenivasa, advocate and activist said on Sunday.
A twitter handle called @BlrForLove was also created as a platform to get the government to focus more on finding solutions for the raging pandemic than deflecting away from it.
Bengaluru is showing signs of plateauing as it registered 20897 new infections in the 24 hours on Sunday that takes its active case count to 350,370. Meanwhile, the other districts of Karnataka continue to see a surge and the state recorded 47,930 new infections that takes the active caseload to 564,485, one of the highest in the country. Bengaluru accounted for 280 out of the 490 fatalities, according to the daily bulletin of the health department on Sunday.
Social media has played an active role in the ongoing Covid-19 second wave as it has become the most used platform to highlight the plight of patients, seek help or make public any apathy on the administration’s part.
With most of Bengaluru’s hospital beds full, relatives of coronavirus (Covid-19) infected persons have used social media platforms to seek help in securing beds, oxygen, medicines and even ambulances to ferry the dead.
For those seeking oxygen, there is also a twitter handle, @oxygenblr where verified information about oxygen supplies in Bengaluru is posted on a regular basis.
