On Saturday, Tewari initiated a conversation with Mani Shankar Aiyar, former Indian diplomat-turned-Congress politician, on an important matter like former Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s call for a bolder military posture in Afghanistan and India’s role in it. 

Little did Tewari know that he we conversing with a parody account. 

This is how it started:

To which the parody account replied:

Poor Tewari. He went on…

Clearly, Tewari didn’t read the account’s bio. It says – “Parody Account of a Tea Connoisseur and self-declared intellectual giant. Slightly pompous. Love Macaulay. Legend (in my own mind)”.

This is the account:

 Twitter wasn’t letting it go:

And the trolling got so massive that the real Mani Shankar Aiyar had to clarify it to the media that he does not use Twitter.

“Somebody has opened a ‘parody account’ on Twitter in my name and attributed to me a remark I never made. As some of the respondents to the remark appear not to have understood that it was from a ‘parody account’, this is to clarify that I do not have a twitter account and have never had one,” he said in a public statement.

And finally, Manish Tewari realised his mistake. But it seems he took it in the right spirit. Although he deleted the earlier tweets, he did acknowledge how he fell into the trap: 

Peace!

(With inputs from PTI)