Image credit: Screengrab from Rahul Gandhi's Twitter account
New Delhi:
Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi is now on Twitter. Or at least his office is. The handle @OfficeOfRG has acquired the white tick in a blue circle that says it is verified; it has three tweets, follows three and already has 25.2 K followers and growing.
The latecomer to Twitter's political party of course has some way to go before he catches up with many of his own party colleagues like Shashi Tharoor (2.98 million followers) or even say, Milind Deora (277K followers).
Then there is Prime Minister Narendra Modi - the chief target of Rahul Gandhi's speech in Parliament today and other days - who is the third most followed world leader on Twitter after US President Barack Obama and the Pope.
PM Modi, 64, has been on Twitter since January 2009 and has 12.1 million followers. He has also logged 7,693 tweets, including this morning's celebration of Rabindranath Tagore.
Right now, the PM is adding followers on the Chinese social media site Weibo, which he joined two days ago in preparation of his visit to China next week. PM Modi now has 42.1K followers on Weibo and the state-run Xinhua news agency has reported that the Chinese are "applauding" the PM's account.
The PM is also active on Facebook with a verified account and 28,184,113 likes; on Instagram, where he has 447K followers and Google Plus, with 2,617,840 followers. He is also on Pinterest, Tumblr and Flickr.
Rahul Gandhi, 44, is clearly not a fan of social media yet. His Facebook page is not verified, and has 378,024 likes. If he has a presence on other social media sites, it's hard to find.
His Twitter handle seems to tentatively promise a change, though the three handles it follows right now are all those of Congress outfits. Today's tweet - watch this space for information and updates on Rahul Gandhi's official programs and upcoming events.