Rahul Gandhi doesn’t only make gaffes when he’s speaking in front of crowds — he seems to make gaffes even with his battery of advisors on Twitter.
Today Rahul Gandhi tried to mock PM Modi for suggesting that drinking water and oxygen be extracted from the air in high-moisture coastal areas. “The real danger to India isn’t that our PM doesn’t understand. It’s the fact that nobody around him has the guts to tell him,” he said on Twitter while sharing the video.
Rahul Gandhi obviously thought he’d pulled a fast one on Modi, but he’d only served to reveal his own ignorance — as it turns out, extracting water and oxygen from air is an established process.
“Extracting water as well as oxygen from air through wind turbine technology as well as linked cryogenic ASUs is an established process, with hundreds of plants worldwide already generating billions in revenue,” wrote JNU scientist Anand Ranganathan, who’s won several awards for his research in microbiology. “Extracting stupidity from you has not yet been patented, though,” he added.
It shouldn’t even have needed a trained scientist to point out the obvious to Rahul Gandhi. A simple Google search would’ve led him to something called an Atmospheric Water Generator, which does exactly what PM Modi had described.
There are also hundreds of articles online describing the process. “This new wind turbine produces clean drinking water out of thin air,” Business Insider had written all the way back in 2012.
Once it was established that Rahul Gandhi had been yet again caught with his foot in his mouth, it didn’t take long for memes to start. People started sharing memes showing the kind of scientific discoveries Rahul Gandhi would make. Twitter user @Amit_gujju shared a video of what it would look like if Rahul Gandhi ever sent a satellite to the moon.
Others began making fun of his previous gaffes.
Twitter user @desimojito shared a picture of what Rahul Gandhi thought trees looked like.
Rahul Gandhi has had a rough couple of weeks. He was first caught on camera while deliberately diving in front of the police at Hathras, and then roundly mocked after riding a tractor with a special cushioned sofa created specially for him. More seriously, his aide Shyokan Jivan had been caught on hidden camera trying to stir riots in Uttar Pradesh around the Hathras case. Gandhi is only recently back in India, after missing the entire monsoon session of Parliament while he was abroad, but recent events have shown that his latest India sojourn is going just about as well as the rest of his political career.
