For all of Rahul Gandhi’s international trips, his party doesn’t seem to have much sense of geography.
The Congress today took to Twitter to announce Rahul Gandhi’s upcoming visit to Assam. Rahul Gandhi usually chooses exotic foreign locales for his holidays, but Assam’s going to polls next month, so the Gandhi scion probably thought it was prudent to put in a visit. “Shri Rahul Gandhi will be in Assam,” declared the Congress’ Twitter handle to all of India. It added a picture of Rahul Gandhi doing the namaste, while some beautiful tea gardens gleamed in the background.
But even though the poster looked radiant, the skies looked blue, and the tea gardens looked positively pristine, there was a problem — the photo in the background wasn’t from Assam at all.
In fact, forget Assam, the picture wasn’t even from India. As pointed out by BJP’s Himanta Biswa Sarma, the official Congress handle had picked up a picture from faraway Sri Lanka, and tried to pass it off as though it was from Assam. “Dear Rahul Gandhi, are you visiting Assam or Sri Lanka? You are welcome to visit our state as a tourist but stop insulting us over and over again!” he wrote on Twitter. As evidence, he attached a photo from Adobe’s stock image library with the same tea gardens as the ones Rahul Gandhi was beaming against, titled “Tea Plantations and Factory in Sri Lanka.”
At this point, the Congress seemed to have realized that passing off a different country as their state wouldn’t go down particularly well with Assam’s voters, and deleted its tweet.
Incredibly, this isn’t even the first time that the Congress has used a picture from a different country thinking it was Assam. Just last month, the Congress had shared a photo from Taiwan’s tea gardens, and passed them off as Assam. Primary research doesn’t seem to have helped either — two weeks ago, Priyanka Gandhi had personally visited Assam’s tea gardens, but her party seems to have gotten no better at identifying Assam’s tea gardens. But if one is to look at positives from the situation — if there are any — the Congress seems to be getting warmer. The first picture was from Taiwan, and the second was from Sri Lanka — at this point, the Congress can hope to finally pick a spot from India by the time Assam’s polls come around.
