Ever since his return from a long vacation, Rahul Gandhi has been uncharacteristically vocal – both in and out of Parliament. For long, his absence on social media had been questioned, but by Wednesday stories were circulating about a rather quaintly titled Twitter account @OfficeOfRG:

While it sparked off speculation, there was no confirmation.  As of 11 am on Thursday, the account, with the profile picture of the Congress Vice President, had no bio or even a single tweet, but it had already amassed over 12,000 eager followers, ranging from veteran journalists to different Congress leaders on Twitter, including the official account of its youth wing National Students Union of India.

Even supporters of the party, however, seemed to be left confused by the choice of handle.

Finally, the national spokesperson of the party seemed to confirm the news by responding, with a reference to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Twitter account:

Questions, however, remained:

Many journalists pointed out that the office of Rahul Gandhi had started the process of getting the account verified through Twitter before it started tweeting.

 

However, an official claimed that Twitter was yet to receive any communication from the party, and there seemed to be no clarity about whether to give it the status of an official account. The choice of handle too indicated that the party wanted to play it safe by distancing their leader and it was pretty apparent that we weren't going to see any personalised tweeting from him.  While the account thus remained silent, there were others more than willing to speak on its behalf as it didn't take long for parody accounts with similar handles such as "OffiseOfRG", "OfficeOffRG" and "Officeinrg" to come up.

 

 

And as the news spread, others joined in too.

 

As the jokes mounted, the party perhaps decided to step in with some damage-control. The account was given a formal bio, as it also got verified:
This is the official account of the Office of Rahul Gandhi | Member of Parliament | Vice President, Indian National Congress
12, Tughlak Lane, New Delhi  ·  http://www.inc.in

Not only a bio, the account also tweeted and made it clear what to expect: good old-fashioned press hand-outs:


The response to his tweets summed up what a let-down this whole build-up had been: