When Twitter users pointed out Himanta Biswa Sarma's mistake, he quickly replaced the caption on the image he had tweeted.

New Delhi: On Friday, Himanta Biswa Sarma, a minister in the BJP-led Assam government, tweeted a photo of an Air India plane thanking Prime Minister Narendra Modi for 'restoring the pride of Assam'.

“Neglected over decades, @narendramodi ji @BJP4India have restored pride of Assam. Tail of @airindian plane portrays graceful Bihu dance,” read his tweet.

The empennage of the plane in the photo had a depiction of Assam's Bihu dance.

Within minutes of his tweet, multiple Twitter users pointed out that such Bihu-themed Air India planes existed even before Modi came to power in 2014.

An investigation by AltNews.in, a fact-checking website run by Pratik Sinha, revealed that planes with similar tail art have been around since at least 2008.

Realising his mistake, Sarma, who defected to the BJP from the Congress in 2016, quickly deleted his tweet and shared the same image with a different caption.

Sarma wasn't the only BJP minster who made a faux pas on social media this week. Union minister Piyush Goyal was forced to apologise for tweeting a five-year-old image of an illuminated road in a tweet bragging about the work done by his ministry.

Misrepresenting images to further political aims is a recurring issue – and ministers like Sarma and Goyal are only the latest in a long list of those in power to do so. For what it's worth, they deserve some credit for accepting their mistake – unlike some of their colleagues.

This article went live on August twenty-seventh, two thousand seventeen, at fifty-six minutes past seven in the evening.

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