Tharoor finally manages to find 'authentic' pic of Nehru's US visit

New Delhi: After a tweet on Tuesday had gone geographically and grammatically wrong, senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor made a strong comeback a day later, putting up another photo of former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to make his point that most Indian prime ministers have been popular abroad – not just Narendra Modi.

In an attempt to make light of the tremendous reception Modi got in Houston, Texas on Sunday, the Thiruvananthapuram had tweeted on Tuesday a photo of Nehru and Indira Gandhi by feted by a huge crowd abroad in the 1950s.

He said it was in USA, 1956, when the photo was actually taken in Magnitogorsk, USSR in 1955. He had also spelt Indira wrong.

He was much trolled on Twitter following the post.

In his customary linguistic flourish, Tharoor tweeted Wednesday: “After the Twitter kerfuffle about a mislabelled photograph, here's an authenticated pair of pix from our PM's visit to the US in 1949: a large crowd of people gathers at the University of Wisconsin to listen to a speech by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in November 1949.''

He further celebrated the popularity of Nehru, stating, he “remains the only Indian Prime Minister to be greeted on arrival at the airport by a US President —and it happened twice: President Harry S Truman in 1949 and President John F Kennedy in 1961 both received him off the plane”.

In both tweets, irresepective of the errors, Tharoor tried to make the point that American crowds have always been receptive to Indian leaders “without any special PR campaign, NRI crowd management or hyped-up media publicity”.