Why AAP and BJP are fighting over @CMODelhi handle on X
The Delhi CMO has mailed X asking them to restore the original handle to avoid ‘misuse’ and ‘tampering’. It is clear that the political battleground has shifted; the fight is over digital estate.
The controversy over former Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal changing the name of the official Twitter handle from @CMODelhi to @KejriwalAtWork after losing the Delhi elections signals a new shift. (Express Archive Photo/ Praveen Khanna) It was a sweltering evening in Kolkata. The BBD bag market was abuzz with regular activities: Traffic snarls, cries of street hawkers, gatherings of blue-collared employees near tea shops. Except for the heavy police deployment in front of a red-brick building that stood guard to a historic transition. The left front leaders were about to vacate the building, paving the way for what the opposition called “paribartan”. May 2011 not only changed the fate of Bengal politics forever; it rescripted the destiny of the red-brick Writers Building, once the house of the British government, later, the seat of undivided and divided Bengal governments: A repository of history. Within two years of coming to power, Mamata Banerjee shifted out of Writers and made Nabanna, a white building in Howrah, the new home of the West Bengal secretariat. Perhaps she wanted to leave the imprints of 34 years of left rule behind. Sometimes, departure from the “old” brings in “new” work culture. Occasionally, it reshapes the imagination of the future, limiting past narratives within the four walls of the abandoned space.
Fast forward to 2025. The controversy over former Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal changing the name of the official Twitter handle from @CMODelhi to @KejriwalAtWork after losing the Delhi elections signals a new shift. The Delhi CMO has mailed X asking them to restore the original handle to avoid “misuse” and “tampering”. When it comes to social media accounts, the fight is not over memory. That the Kejriwal government used it for almost a decade and flooded the feed with declarations of its administrative initiatives doesn’t bar the newly anointed government from using it. What matters here is the number of followers — the invisible audience who shape political opinions on such microblogging sites.
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