Mehdi Hasan is used to abuse from fans of the people he interviews on his famously combative Al Jazeera show, Head to Head. But even by those standards, the last few days have been particularly "special". Hasan took to Twitter to point out how a Hindu nationalist troll army has spent the last few days attempting to smear him, all because of a feisty interview with Bharatiya Janata Party General Secretary Ram Madhav, which made headlines back in India.




The reaction came after Hasan's interview with Madhav, which Al Jazeera posted under the title Is Modi's India flirting with fascism? The fact that it was an Al Jazeera anchor itself would have rankled Modi supporters, because the channel is widely believed to be soft on terrorism and biased towards Pakistan's view of the Kashmir issue. Adding in the "fascism" reference wouldn't have helped. And finally putting tough questions of the sort that Indian politicians like Madhav are rarely subject to seems to have put the right-wing troll army over the edge.

A couple of instances from the interview made noise. Madhav told Hasan that he still stands by a belief in the Akhand Bharat idea, which involves India, Pakistan and Bangladesh merging to form a united country. The BJP has distanced itself from this comment, which comes with connotations of Indian expansionism as well as majoritarianism. Madhav was also prompted into calling the Taj Mahal a product of Hindu culture.

Madhav then went on to make what might seem like a harmless error, if it were not seen in context with all else he was saying.

The combination of these headlines gave much of Twitter reason to believe that Madhav had been bested in the interview. Which naturally meant funny and triumphant troll-y Twitter reactions from those opposed to the BJP, as well as the right-wing troll machine whirring its turbines.