Take Abhijit Iyer, a strident right-wing analyst who spent more than a month in jail for a satirical video about a temple in Odisha that 'hurt religious sentiments', and a year-old tweet about the origin of the rosogulla.
His specific ‘crimes’ were sarcastic, disparaging comments about the sexually explicit scenes depicted on the walls of Konark temple, and tweeting a year back, “There’s no such thing as an Odia rosogulla.” Iyer was one of the loudest voices against freedom of speech when that speech went against his own sentiments, though. At one time, he had tweeted calling for the arrest of American historian Audrey Truschke for "hurting Hindu sentiments."
Now, after having been stuck in a political dogfight between BJD leader and Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik and former BJD MP Jay Panda to whom Iyer is close, the vocal provocateur must see the irony: That he has fallen prey to the forces of intolerance he helped fan. Even as liberals grudgingly protested the farce of his arrest (and it is grudging), the right-wing ecosystem that once propped him up mostly abandoned him to his days in prison.