It all began when netizens owing allegiance to BJP created the hashtag “gobackstalin” against DMK working president MK Stalin who has gone on an overseas tour to England. The hashtag briefly gained traction with BJP supporters registering around 20,000 tweets in a little over three hours, making it the one of the leading trends in Chennai on Tuesday afternoon. The DMK IT wing, which was briefly caught off guard, responded soon enough by creating the hashtag “welcomeStalin”. What the BJP Twitterati did not expect was #welcomestalin registered more than double the number of tweets than #gobackstalin!

This Twitter clash dates back to the time DMK took on BJP by making #gobackmodi# the top trending hashtag in Twitter’s history during the PM’s visit to Tamil Nadu in April. The battle resurfaced during Amit Shah’s visit last week when #gobackamitshah started to trend. However, despite the DMK’s show of strength on Twitter, a few party sympathizers took to Facebook to wonder why one of the strongest contenders for the CM post was wasting time in a virtual war with a party that scored less than NOTA in the RK Nagar bypolls.