During Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech to the World Economic Forum on Monday via video-conferencing, he halted abruptly, glanced sideways in response to a voice, gestured with his hands, adjusted his earpiece, and proceeded to ask Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, if he could be heard clearly.
After Schwab assured him he could, Modi enquired whether the interpreter’s voice was audible to everyone. The broadcast had to be stopped for a few minutes before the Indian Prime Minister resumed his address from the beginning.
This year the event is being held virtually and not physically in Davos.
On social media, the initial reaction promptly concluded there was a glitch in the teleprompter, and that Modi was floundering without it. The hashtag #TeleprompterPM started trending on Twitter, with more than 60,000 tweets having been posted with the hashtag by noon on Tuesday.
Opposition leaders like Congress MP Rahul Gandhi and National President of India Youth Congress Srinivas BV were quick to post mocking tweets. And an old video of Rahul Gandhi pointing at Modi’s reliance on teleprompters also resurfaced with alacrity.
Then the jokes kicked in, using the idea of Jawaharlal Nehru being responsible for the problem, a sly dig at the penchant of the ruling party to blame India’s first prime minister for many of today’s problems in the country.
Soon after the clip of Modi’s speech went viral, workers and supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party swung into action, posting identically worded tweets in defence of the Prime Minister and blaming technical problems on the World Economic Forum’s video-conferencing platform.
Rajya Sabha MP Priyanka Chaturvedi of the Shiv Sena was one of many pointing out the use of identical tweets. BJP supporters like Priti Gandhi also posted a counter-version to the “teleprompterPM” narrative.
Pratik Sinha of the fact-checking website AltNews pointed out that the teleprompter was unlikely to have been the cause of the problem, since a voice can be heard asking Modi to check whether he can be heard by the World Economic Forum audience. The Indian prime minister can then be seen and head posing this question to Schwab, who, however, responds to say Modi can indeed be heard clearly, and there is no audio problem.
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