By Bizodisha Bureau, Bhubaneswar, August 25, 2017: The Bharaitya Janata Party [BJP] on Friday questioned the authenticity of Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik’s popularity on social media saying that the CM’s twitter account has ‘Ghost followers.’

BJP general secretary Bhrugu Baxipatra accused Patnaik for misleading public by inflating the number of his followers on Twitter.

Speaking at a press conference, Baxipatra alleged that fake followers are being created through a software as there were nearly 5,979 ghost followers out of the total 6,165 people who followed Patnaik in the month of July and August.

Naveen had set up his twitter handle in 2015 and a total of 674K people are following him.

The number of followers was limited to 1.5 lakh till June 2017 and his Twitter handle saw a surge of nearly 5 lakh followers within a span of 54 days, the BJP pointed out.

It further alleged that Naveen Patnaik’s twitter handle –‘Naveen_Odisha’ has added 9,000 followers per day in July-August period this year in comparison to 2.5 posts per day. It was about 100 followers per day before July 2017.

These ghost followers neither have tweeted for a single time nor are they following any other celebrity or politician, added BJP.

“CM Naveen Patnaik is misleading youths through fabricated information. We have found nearly 6,500 such fake accounts in our survey,” said Baxipatra.

Defending his leader, information and technology minister Chandra Sarathi Behera said, “A lot of pro-people programmes have led to the rise in Twitter followers of CM Naveen Patnaik.”

BJD leader Amar Sapathy went a step further, “We all know that Naveen Patnaik’s popularity has grown and there is nothing unusual in the rise of his twitter followers. It seems that BJP is now shocked after Patnaik won the best administrator award recently.”

Satpathy further said that BJP is trying to malign Naveen Patnaik and making baseless allegations without any evidence.