By Abhishek Kumar
Soon after his appointment as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s national social media co-convenor, Arun Yadav made his X account private and then deleted more than 60,000 posts before making it public again. When the account was locked, it showed around 65,500 posts. By August 22, only 2,794 remained – a deletion exercise that wiped out virtually his entire publicly visible posting history.
At present, the oldest post that can be traced on Yadav’s timeline dates to August 19, 2026. All posts preceding it have been deleted. Many of those posts included abusive and racist remarks, attacks on women’s character, and content directly targeting Muslims in communally provocative terms.
On August 17, the BJP announced a new social media cell where Deepak Mhaskey replaced Amit Malviya a the party’s IT cell chief. One of the newly inducted members of the social media cell was Yadav, who had previously been removed from his position as head of the Haryana BJP IT Cell.
When attention turned to Yadav’s old social media record following his new appointment, he locked his X account, @BeingArun28. Yadav has now made his account public again, but not before deleting the posts on a massive scale. The sequence of events indicates that making the account private might have given him the opportunity to remove his old controversial posts and wipe his social media record clean.
A review of Yadav’s social media activity over the past several years reveals a clear pattern: abusive and racist remarks against opposition leaders, attacks on women’s character, and several explicit instances of directly targeting Muslim minorities and making communally provocative statements.
The post that led to his ouster in 2022
Yadav’s history of controversial remarks goes back several years. In 2017, he shared an image of the Kaaba in Mecca alongside a glass of whisky and wrote in an objectionable post that he could see “the Prophet in a peg of alcohol”. Questions continued to be raised over the remark for years. Finally, amid mounting pressure, Haryana BJP removed Yadav from his post as state IT Cell chief on July 8, 2022.
The timing of the action taken against him was particularly significant. It came just a month after then BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma’s derogatory remarks about prophet Muhammad of Islam had sparked a massive controversy in India and abroad. During a television debate, the BJP spokesperson had made offensive remarks about the prophet, triggering an international backlash.
Amid intense international pressure, the BJP had termed its spokesperson a “fringe element” and expelled her from the party. The following month, a screenshot of Yadav’s old objectionable post went viral on social media. In this sensitive environment, Yadav’s removal was, in a sense, a tacit acknowledgement that his post had crossed a line the party was not prepared to publicly defend at the time.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.