Public Sentiment on Ayodhya Verdict by the Supreme Court of India

Social media has become one of the most important sources in understanding opinion of people regarding important and trending topics. One such topic was the Supreme Court’s verdict on almost seven-decade old Ayodhya land dispute case. On 9th November 2019, the apex court ordered that the disputed land in question be used for construction of Ram Temple. As it was one of the most anticipated judgements in India’s history, Twitter, was buzzing long before the date of verdict. To perform sentiment analysis, around 70,000 tweets pertaining to the verdict were collected from 26th Oct 2019 to 23rd Nov 2019. The dataset was then divided into three phases i.e., pre-verdict, on day of verdict and post-verdict and NRC Lexicon has been used to analyze the results and extract positive, negative, and neutral tweets. Sentiment analysis of each phase indicates that the verdict has been accepted by the public.