Rahul Gandhi has now largely retreated from active politics, and spends most of his time sharing his thoughts on Twitter. But he doesn’t seem to be faring any better in the digital world than he did in the real one.
Rahul Gandhi today attempted to congratulate Avani Lekhara, who’d won a Gold medal at the ongoing Tokyo Paralympic games. “Morning starts with the great news of Avni Lakhera winning #Gold. Big Congratulations! Another daughter makes India proud,” he happily tweeted.
The tweet was a marked departure from the hate and fake news that Rahul Gandhi usually spreads on Twitter, but it still had Rahul Gandhi written all over it — he’d managed to misspell both the first name and the last name of the champion athlete.
The athlete who’d won the Gold at the Tokyo Paralympics, as per her own Twitter profile and numerous news stories, spells her name as Avani Lekhara. But Rahul Gandhi had somehow managed to misspell Avani as “Avni”. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he managed to misspell Lekhara as “Lakhera”. Gandhi had, in essence, managed to congratulate a completely different person instead of the athlete who’d won the gold medal.
Now Rahul Gandhi is no stranger to gaffes — there can be whole encyclopedias written about all the times he’s had his foot in his mouth over his political career. But his misspelling of Avani Lekhara’s name is particularly egregious. Gandhi’s actions are not only disrespectful of an athlete who’d probably strived for years to win a medal, only to have a prominent politician butcher her name to his 2 crore followers, but also shines a light on Rahul Gandhi’s own particular capabilities. Gandhi spends most of his time trying to advise the government on matters of the economy and geopolitics, but the fact that he can fail this spectacularly in the relatively simple job of writing down a person’s name shows why most of India doesn’t take his rants seriously any more.
