"India is what it is today because of Nehru, his vision and his lifetime of dedication to the nation," President Pranab Mukherjee had said, while delivering the 46th Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture on the eve of his 125th birth anniversary, in November 2014.

"Nehru's services to India are immeasurable. He was one of the greatest figures of our times," Mukherjee had added.

The sentiment  is neither novel nor revolutionary, so it remained quite a mystery as to why and how the hashtag #BecauseOfNehru trended for a big part of the day today, particularly as it did not happen to be any anniversary of the great man.

So why was it trending? Well, that too was answered among the tweets that seemed to flow ceaselessly through the day:

Attempted jocularity aside, the hashtag seems to have originated with an innocuous tweet:


Whether or not this was in response to another tweet, earlier on Saturday, is of course now moot, but our investigations seem to suggest that something like the following may well have been responsible for the hashtag that followed and trended:

While tweets about Kashmir, the 1962 war, Pakistan, Sardar Patel, Lady Edwina Mountbatten et al were predictable, it must have been a function of a slow news day that the topic trended the way it did:

But it wasn't all serious.  Along with some usual mean-spirited abusive tweets, there was also wit, sarcasm and hilarity.  Some tweets that caught our eye:













So much so that some friends from other side of the border joined in as well:

And, of course, none other than historian Ramachandra Guha too pitched in: