First among equals

On Saturday, the team that handles Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Twitter handle @PMOIndia, had to delete a tweet about his visit to Bodh Gaya. This is what the handle had tweeted at 7.50 am: "I consider myself blessed to be visiting Bodh Gaya. After Pandit Nehru, this is the first time a PM will visit Bodh Gaya." The claim was wrong because several other PMs had visited Bodh Gaya. What the PM's Twitter team had intended to say was that Modi, as he had also claimed in his Mann ki Baat radio broadcast, was the first PM after Nehru to attend the Buddhist conference at Bodh Gaya. The tweet was deleted but not before some among the millions of Twitter followers of the PM had taken a screen-shot of it. Twitter handle @scotchism retweeted the tweet, adding: "Ladies and Gentlemen, I give (you) the first Prime Minister who had to delete his tweet because of his obsession with 'firsts'."