India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has been included in Foreign Policy magazine’s 2016 list of 15 Global Thinkers “for fashioning a novel brand of Twitter diplomacy”. In a website posting, the magazine recalled how, when around 10,000 Indian workers in Saudi Arabia faced a “food crisis” earlier this year due to job losses, Sushma Swaraj tweeted about the issue to six million followers on the social media website.
“What followed was a weeks-long social media operation in which Swaraj posted information for migrants about rations provided by the Indian embassy, claims for unpaid wages, and government-organized transportation home,” it said.
Stating that this was not the first time that Sushma Swaraj used the internet to reach out to people abroad, the posting said: “From evacuating Indians from Yemen to helping replace lost passports, Swaraj has earned the nickname ‘the common tweeple’s leader’ for her aggressive use of Twitter.”
Swaraj was named in the ‘decision makers’ category along with the Democratic Party US presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon, German chancellor Angela Merkel and US attorney general Loretta Lynch among others. “Very proud to see our hardworking EAM @SushmaSwaraj part of the @ForeignPolicy Global Thinkers list 2016! Congrats,” PM Narendra Modi tweeted.
The magazine recalled how, when around 10,000 Indian workers in Saudi Arabia faced a “food crisis” earlier this year due to job losses, Swaraj tweeted about the issue to six million followers on the social media website. Sushma Swaraj is currently recuperating from a kidney transplant operation at the All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi.
