91, or 91 minus one, Prime Minister?

Even the mighty Prime Minister of India is unable to keep track of the churn inside the so-called BJP washing machine that sucks rivals into its huge innards and disgorges them squeaky clean and smelling of roses.

Turns out Prime Minister Narendra Modi may have unwittingly depended on a list drawn up by a Hindi news portal called Perform India to come up with the precise number of 91 while enumerating the “gaalis” showered on him by the Congress.

In the process, Modi has retained a curious entry at Number 32: a ubiquitous Hindi abuse attributed to Alpesh Thakor.

The problem is, Thakor is now in the BJP, having purified himself in the purgatory of the purported washing machine.

Of course, it is possible that the Prime Minister deliberately kept Number 32 undisturbed to remind the world of Thakor’s truant ways when he was with the Congress and before the BJP taught him to stick to the straight and the narrow.

Two days before Modi unveiled the count of 91, BJP social media head Amit Malviya had posted a tweet asking how many times the Congress had abused the Prime Minister and attaching a short video of the Perform India list.

If the Prime Minister indeed sourced data from a tweet sourced from a news portal’s report, it would appear that Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has given more credit to his statistics-gathering apparatus than it deserves.

Priyanka had said that “someone in his (the Prime Minister’s) office has prepared a list”. Evidently, the Prime Minister relies on what newspapers call more “reliable sources”.

Modi himself had indicated, while addressing a rally at Belagavi in Karnataka on April 29, that someone outside his immediate circles had drawn up the list.

"Someone has made a list of such abuses against me and it has been sent to me. Till now, Congress people have abused me 91 times with different types," the Prime Minister was quoted as saying.

The list tweeted by Malviya has been tweeted by some people known to be part of the BJP ecosystem.

Mohammed Zubair of fact-checking website AltNews referred to the entry at No. 32 to take a dig at Malviya on Twitter, saying he should have removed Alpesh from the list before circulating it among chosen journalists.

“How will they know that @AlpeshThakor_ has already joined the BJP after abusing Modi ji?” Zubair tweeted.

The list does not count the abuses in chronological or reverse chronological order.

It starts with Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge’s recent “poisonous snake” analogy, which he later clarified was aimed at the BJP ideology and not Modi as an individual.

At Number One is a sobriquet attributed to Congress leader B.K. Hariprasad that was apparently aired in 2009. At Number 17 figures then Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s 2007 description of Modi (then Gujarat chief minister) as “maut ka saudagar (merchant of death)”.