Ever since it was trounced in the Lok Sabha elections, things have been going on a downward slide for the Congress. First, Rahul Gandhi quit as party president, and despite repeated pleading by senior leaders, practically went AWOL.

This month, the grand old party lost Karnataka, one of the biggest states it ruled, after 15 MLAs of the Congress-JD(S) coalition rebelled. In Goa, 10 out of its 15 MLAs defected to the saffron party.

There is, however, one Gandhi who seems to have not given up - Rahul's sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. She has remained vocal against the government, both on the ground as was seen after the Sonbhadra massacre of 10 tribals, and on social media. On Twitter, she has overtaken brother Rahul.

India Today's Data Intelligence Unit (DIU) analysed the Twitter statistics of Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi between March 1 and July 20 this year. It was found that Priyanka, who was averse to Twitter during elections, has been tweeting frequently in July, while her brother Rahul has shown a reverse trend.

Numbers speak

Priyanka joined Twitter in February this year, after being appointed general secretary of Congress' eastern Uttar Pradesh wing. She posted her first tweet in March. The number of tweets posted by Priyanka declined as elections neared end.

She had posted 18 tweets in March, 16 in April and eight in May.

But since the elections concluded, the number of tweets posted by Priyanka saw an upward surge. In June, she posted 18 tweets, and till July 20, she had posted 38.

Rahul, on the other hand, posted 47 tweets in March, which increased to 54 in April. The number fell constantly thereafter. In May, he posted 45 tweets. After the Lok Sabha elections, he posted 24 tweets in June and 12 till July 20.

Rahul still ahead in engagements

Though Priyanka has actively started voicing out on Twitter, her brother is way ahead in terms of engagements he gets from the social media portal. The average re-tweets per tweet that Rahul received in this time period has always been higher than Priyanka.

But that also has to do with the number of followers both the leaders have on Twitter. While Priyanka has close to 6 lakh followers, Rahul, who joined Twitter in 2015, crossed the 1 crore-mark in terms of followers on July 10 this year. This is 20 times more than Priyanka.

Qualitative differences

Apart from simple statistics, both Congress leaders differ in what and how they tweet as well.

Priyanka mostly tweets in Hindi. Of the total 98 tweets she posted so far, 70 per cent were in Hindi and the rest in English.

Rahul, on the other hand, has posted only 27 per cent of his tweets in Hindi, 71 per cent in English and remaining 2 per cent in Tamil, Malayalam and Marathi (one tweet in each language).

Apart from that, Priyanka congratulates both national and local talent emerging from Uttar Pradesh, the state she is handling. She also picks up news articles and videos highlighting the grievances of people of the state and often questions the Yogi government.

Last week, Priyanka made headlines when she was detained at Mirzapur while on her way to meet the victims of the Sonbhadra violence. She tweeted about her protest and when she was allowed to meet the victims, she also shared the video of the conversation she had with them.

Rahul's Twitter handle on the other hand mostly targets PM Modi and the BJP. Like his sister, he also tweets about local talent and condoles incidents of violence, but the number of those tweets is less.

Rahul had irked Twitterati when he tried to troll the Army Dog Unit on International Yoga Day. He had posted images of the 2, Army Dog Unit of Indian Army doing yoga and captioned it "New India".