Shashi Tharoors ‘Malayali Taliban’ tweet draws flak on social media

Congress MP
Shashi Tharoor shared a video on Twitter on Tuesday which showed a group of
Taliban fighters celebrating its victory in Afghanistan. Sharing the video, Tharoor wrote, “It sounds as if there are at
least two Malayali Taliban here — one who says samsarikkette around the
8-second mark & another who understands him.”.

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Tharoor’s
tweet seemingly stirred a hornet’s nest as several Malayalam-speakers and other
social media users criticised the MP for allegedly branding Malayali people as “terrorist
sympathisers”.    

One social
media user disagreed with Shashi Tharoor’s claim that the Taliban fighters in the
video were speaking in Malayalam. He said that those in the video were speaking
Brahvi language, which sounds similar to Dravidian languages, spoken in The Zabul
province of Afghanistan.

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“There are
no #kerala origin fighters in rank and file of #taliban they are #baloch from
#zabul province who speak brahvi and brahvi language is widely spoken among
them, it’s a dravidian language very similar to telgu tamil malayalam etc (sic)”,
said the Twitter user.  

Shashi Tharoor,
however, was not fully convinced with the theory and said, “Interesting
explanation. Will leave it to the linguists to figure this one out. But there
have been misguided Malayalis who joined the Taliban, so that possibility cannot
be ruled out entirely.

Incensed by
Tharoor’s tweet, one Twitter user criticised the MP for forcing the entire
Malayali community to defend themselves against being branded as terrorist
sympathisers with his couple of tweets. “Why don’t you leave us alone,” the
user said.

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Yet another
user tweeted, “Shashi Tharoor tweets out BJP-RSS propaganda about Malayali
Talibanis based on ‘ONE’ word in a video which sounds similar to Malayalam.”

Many
Twitter users also accused the Congress MP for fuelling ‘fascistic right wing
accounts’ by insisting upon the presence of Malayali people within Taliban’s
rank and file.