In an attempt to playdown Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi's Howdy Modi event at Houston, Texas which was attended by over 50,000 Indian-Americans, eloquent and senior leader of the Congress party, Shashi Tharoor landed himself into embarrassment.

Tharoor had taken to Twitter to share a picture of Indira Gandhi and Nehru, which he claimed was from a visit to the United States. The picture showed the two former prime ministers being received by the masses in a foreign land.

However, in an embarrassing development, the picture shared by Tharoor turned out to be of a state visit by the then PM Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi to Russia in 1956.

This came as an embarrassing development for Tharoor who had claimed that Nehru and Indira Gandhi had received adulation in the US during their visit.

In the picture, Tharoor claimed for Nehru and Indira Gandhi a “spontaneous turnout of the American public, without any special PR campaign, NRI crowd management or hyped-up media publicity”.

Many on Twitter corrected Tharoor saying that the such a welcome was orchestrated by the USSR for the friends of the communist state, and the trip was “carefully stage-managed”.

Tharoor later tweeted, “I am told this picture (forwarded to me) probably is from a visit to the USSR and not the US. Even if so, it still doesn't alter the message: the fact is that former PMs also enjoyed popularity abroad. When PM Narendra Modi is honoured, PM of India is honoured; respect is for India.”