KalingaTV News Network
Bhubaneswar: With 1.4 lakh Twitter followers added in a day, India’s new Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman took social media by storm on Sunday.
According to reports, Sitharaman, who was named the Defence Minister in the Narendra Modi Cabinet, got 1,40, 7300 new Twitter followers within just 24 hours of her appointment. Currently, she has 1,541,783 followers.
Nirmala, who served in the Commerce Ministry with independent charge before her elevation to the Cabinet rank, was also the most searched name in Google India for the day. She even surpassed North Korea, which terrorized the whole world by testing another nuclear device yesterday. But curiously, only 30 of those who searched for her on Google were from Tamil Nadu, her home state.
While the maximum of 100 people of those who searched for the first full-time woman Defence Minister of the country were from Goa, Uttarakhand with 50 people and Jharkhand with 46 people stood second and third in the list of those searching for her on Google India.
Railway Minister Piyush Goyal was the second most searched among the Ministers who were elevated to cabinet rank and inducted into the council of Ministers yesterday.
A quick look into the political career of Sitharaman
Nirmala, who was born in Madurai of Tamil Nadu on 18 August 1959, joined the BJP in 2006 even as her husband Dr. Parakala Prabhakar joined the Prajarajyam Party floated by film star Chiranjeevi in 2007.
She was enlisted as one of the six party spokespersons in March 2010 during Nitin Gadkari’s tenure as BJP president. Since then, she has been a regular on the news TV channels speaking for BJP and its leaders, including Narendra Modi.
As an articulate spokesperson of the BJP, Nirmala played an important role in the run up to the 2014 elections by effectively projecting the Modi-for-PM message. Finally, the BJP won a landslide in the general elections in 2014 and went on to form the central government.
On May 26 2014, Nirmala Sitharaman was sworn in as Minister of State (Independent Charge) in the Ministry of Commerce & Industry, as well as a Minister of State for Finance and Corporate Affairs which fall under the Ministry of Finance headed by Arun Jaitley.
She contested and won a by-election to the Rajya Sabha from the state of Andhra Pradesh. On 29 May 2016, she was one among the 12 candidates nominated by the BJP to contest the Rajya Sabha elections due on 11 June 2016. She successfully contested the elections from Karnataka.
Ms Kalinga