HYDERABAD: Poll season is here, and netizens in the State are celebrating it by mimicking famous speeches of politicians and uploading clips of themselves on social media.
The trend has caught on far and wide through the Tiktok app, and the politicians who have provided fodder for the frenzy include Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi, his brother Akbaruddin Owaisi, and BJP MLA Raja Singh. For the uninitiated, Tiktok is a China-based video-creating platform made in 2016, which lets users add dialogues/music in the background and create short videos to play over it.
A search on TikTok shows that while videos with the hashtag ‘KCR’ have been viewed 22.3 million times, those under the hashtag of BJP Goshamahal MLA Raja Singh have been viewed 1.9 million times. However, AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi and his brother Akbaruddin take the top spot in terms of views gathered. While the hashtag ‘asaduddin_owaisi’ has 1.3 lakh views and ‘asaduddinowaisisahab’ has 1.21 lakh views, ‘akbaruddin_owaisi_speech_aimim_mla’ has 2.41 lakh views.
However, what exactly are the videos? Most pertaining to Asaduddin Owaisi are that of the speech he made in Vikarabad, during the State Assembly elections. In the speech, which was preceded by the release of an audio clip in which Congress workers allegedly tried to bribe an AIMIM worker with `5 lakh, Owaisi sarcastically said he has ‘paan’ worth that money. One such video uploaded by one Anees Rahman of the same speech has 85,700 ‘hearts’, 357 comments and 1,200 shares.
As for CM K Chandrasekhar Rao, the videos are not concentrated on a single speech, but various ones in which he taunts the opposition for criticising him, the party or the State government’s schemes.