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12th Aug 2019

This is why the hashtag #BritishOccupiedIreland is trending on Twitter in India

Rory Cashin

trending

It began as a reaction to BBC coverage in the region.

The hashtag #BritishOccupiedIreland began trending in India over the weekend, after director Shekhar Kapur tweeted a question at BBC News.

Kapur queried why the news broadcaster referred to Kashmir as “Indian occupied”, but didn’t apply to same description to Northern Ireland as being “British occupied”.

Kapur has close to three million followers on the social media platform, and within a few hours, the tweet had close to 100,000 likes.

This then spurned on a series of other tweets to take up the #BritishOccupedIreland hashtag and continue asking the question towards the national British broadcaster:

Some of the tweet’s have since been retweeted by Baijayant Panda, the vice president of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, who accompanied the tweets with a statement of his own:

“Exactly! Fact is BBCWorld, J&K [Jammu and Kasmir] acceded to India in the same environment & under the exact same rules that YOUR country applied to ALL the princely states. It never was a bilateral or international issue. So please stop the hypocrisy, & stop stoking trouble where there isn’t any.”