Ram Vilas Paswan, Union Minister for Food and Public Distribution, was the focus of unusual attention on Twitter today after he tweeted out photographs of Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan meeting him at his residence in Delhi, and wrongly captioned it with the name of the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister O Panneerselvam.
The tweet went missing after a while, possibly after someone pointed out the mistake. But in this age of screenshots, the minister found it hard to cover-up as Twitterati ribbed him about it, posting comments along with the image of his earlier post.
Delhi is notorious for branding anyone from South India as Madrasis, and one Twitter user commented on the minister’s gaffe alluding to that stereotyping.
Another Tweeter, a Malayali, reminded the minister that Keralites don’t take kindly to the disrespect of their icons, whether it was the Chief Minister of ‘God’s Own Country’ or cricket god Sachin Tendulkar. He recalled how vociferously Malayalees trolled tennis star Maria Sharapova for saying she didn’t know who the ‘Master Blaster’ was.
Surprisingly, out of his 2,29,376 followers, only a few seem to have noticed the gaffe — going by the number of replies to Paswan’s amended tweet.
Possibly, there were some replies that got deleted along with the deletion of the original wrongly-captioned tweet. Or did the Paswan’s followers on Twitter, like the minister himself, not realise the difference between one South Indian state’s chief minister and another?
The picture, however, began doing the rounds of Whatsapp and threatens to go around over the next few days, shaming the minister for his seeming indifference to who’s who south of the Vindhyas. But like one Tweeter pointed out, it may not be the minister himself who tweeted out the erroneous message but an underling. The Twitter user suggested (in Hindi) that Paswan “not be miserly, and hire a good secretary” to avoid such embarrassments in future.