Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a firm believer in the power of acronyms. Over the years, he has constantly expanded the Indian electorate’s dictionary with offerings such as JAM (Jan Dhan, Aadhar, Mobile), RSVP (The Gandhis, Rahul Gandhi Sonia, Vadra, Priyanka) and the genre-defying IT + IT + IT (Indian technology plus Indian talent makes India tomorrow), among numerous others.
The latest addition to this list came on Sunday, when the prime minister was speaking in Bengaluru, where he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Parivarthana Rally ahead of the state polls later this year. Reassuring farmers reeling under an agrarian crisis that he was indeed looking out for them, Modi asserted that they were his TOP priority. And by that, he meant: Tomato, Onion, Potato.
The news unsurprisingly attracted a flurry of tweets. Some people decided to fight acronym with acronym, suggesting some alternative short forms that they believed best reflected the government’s politics.
One user heaved a sigh of relief that the prime minister had not taken the acronym too far.
The acronym seemed to have cleared the air for some people who used today’s formulations to help parse the prime minister’s previous statements.
The latest acronym, combined with Modi’s recent controversial remark that those who sell pakodas (or fritters) on the streets should be counted among the employed, proved to be a recipe for much humour.
In the midst of the jokes, one user seemed to have a heartfelt and serious feedback for the prime minister.
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