NEW DELHI: The Nehru jacket has a new name. And it’s not going down well with the Twitterati.
A couple of innocuous tweets by South Korean President Moon Jae-in thanking Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a gift of four tailor-made sleeveless jackets sparked off outrage and angst on the online platform on Wednesday.
“Prime Minister @narendramodi of India sent me some gorgeous garments. These are modernised versions of traditional Indian costume, known as the ‘Modi Vest’, that can also be worn easily in Korea. They fit perfectly,” Moon tweeted with a picture of him wearing one of them.
“During my visit to India, I had told the Prime Minister @narendramodi that he looked great in those vests, and he duly sent them over, all meticulously tailored to my size. I would like to thank him for this kind gesture,” he said in another tweet, which had pictures of the garments on a hanger. Each had a large label identifying them as ‘MODI Jackets’.
Outraged netizens were quick to correct Moon for describing ‘Nehru jacket’ as ‘Modi Vest’.
“It’s really nice of our PM to send these but could he not have sent them without changing the name? All my life I’ve known these jackets as Nehru jackets & now I find these ones have been labelled “Modi Jacket”. Clearly nothing existed in India before 2014,” tweeted former CM of Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah.
“That’s a Nehru jacket not a UPA scheme that Modi can just rename and claim as his own creation!” tweeted a journalist.
“Nehru was first to receive these gorgeous ‘Modi Vest’ garments from Narendra Modi in 1945,” went another sarcastic tweet.