On April 1, on the occasion of April Fool's Day, many social media users opposed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi trended the hashtag #FekuDivas.
Also, it being a polling day in West Bengal's Nandigram assembly, where Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee faces off Trinamool Congress turncoat Suvendu Adhikari, who now represents the Bharatiya Janata Party. Consequently, the hashtag #SuvenduAdhikari was trended throughout the day.
Let us take a closer look at these trends.
#FekuDivas - An Annual April Fool's Trend
The first use of this hashtag was by Twitter handle @sundeepmath on September 17, 2013.
Since then, this hashtag has been tweeted out 34331 times. Starting from April 1, 2014, the hashtag has been used every year on April Fool's Day by opponents of Modi to tweet against him, while calling out his electoral promises and campaign speeches as lies.
This year, the hashtag appeared yet again - tweets started pouring in from March 30 onwards, with a total of 1890 tweets being pushed out by April 1, 12.00 PM.
#SuvenduAdhikari - Bengal Politics On Twitter
On April 1, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee faces off her opponent Suvendu Adhikari - who recently left TMC to join the BJP. Following Adhikari's exit, Banerjee decided to contest against him from Nandigram, instead of Bhawanipore assembly, where she has been the legislator since 2011.
As the assembly went to polls, the hashtag #SuvenduAdhikari started trending across Twitter. We scraped of the tweets with the hashtag and found some interesting results.
Since word of Adhikari's possible exit from party reached the media on November 25, 2020, not a single day has gone by without a tweet using this hashtag. Between November 25, 2020 and April1, 2021, 8800 tweets with this hashtag were posted.
As you can see from the above chart, tweet carrying the hashtag has risen in number in March, with a visible spike in the frequency of such tweets just days before the April 1 polling.
Most of the posts were promoting Adhikari and the BJP, and also running smear campaigns against TMC and Banerjee.