Sushma Swaraj initiates poll asking Twitter users if they approve of trolls abusing her; 43% answer in affirmative

New Delhi: Facing online abuse over a passport row involving an  interfaith couple, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj has initiated a poll on Twitter asking users whether they “approve” such trolling. Till evening, over 110,000 people had taken part in the poll, with 57 percent respondents backing her and 43 percent supporting the trolls. After days of trolling, matters came to a head on Saturday when Swaraj’s husband tweeted a screenshot of a post by a Twitter user who asked him to “beat her up and teach her not to do Muslim appeasement”. Swaraj, who has been retweeting some of the offensive tweets directed at her over the transfer of Passport Seva Kendra official Vikas Mishra in Lucknow for allegedly humiliating the interfaith couple, began a Twitter poll on Saturday night asking people whether such trolling was fine. “Friends : I have liked some tweets. This is happening for the last few days. Do you approve of such tweets? Please RT,” she tweeted. [caption id=“attachment_4642871” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  File image of external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj. AFP[/caption] Swaraj’s husband, who had posted a screenshot of the tweet accusing his wife of appeasing Muslims, on Sunday responded to the person who had posted it saying such words had given his family unbearable pain. “Your words have given us unbearable pain. Just to share with you, my mother died of cancer in 1993. Sushma was an MP and a former education minister. She lived in the hospital for a year. She refused to engage a medical attendant and attended on my dying mother personally,” Kaushal tweeted. “Such was her devotion to the family. As per my father’s wish, she lit my father’s pyre. We adore her. Please do not use such words for her. We are first generation in law and politics. We pray for nothing more than her life. Please convey my profound regards to your wife,” the eminent lawyer said in his message to the person who had targeted Swaraj in his tweet. Swaraj had also retweeted some of the tweets of that person. This came just days after Swaraj was trolled and abused on Twitter over the controversy involving the issuance of passport to the interfaith couple. Mishra was transferred from Lucknow to Gorakhpur after  the couple alleged that he humiliated them when they went to the office with their passport applications. According to the couple, Mishra asked the husband to convert to Hinduism and pulled up the wife for marrying a Muslim. Mishra had said in his defence that he was secular and had told the woman that her ’nikahnama’ showed her name as Shazia Anas, which should be endorsed in her file. A section of social media had attacked Swaraj and the ministry for taking action against Mishra, claiming that he was just doing his duty. The minister had taken it on the chin and retweeted some of the tweets that were even abusive and communal in nature. Asked whether the Ministry of External Affairs is contemplating any action against trolls, ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar had said last week that, “The EAM (external affairs minister) has responded to those malicious tweets and the trolling which she was subjected to in her own way and in a manner which she deemed fit. I don’t think I have anything further to add on that.”