Mahavir Jayanti: Shashi Tharoor mistakenly posts image of Gautam Buddha to mark occasion, gets mocked on Twitter

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor was left embarrassed on Thursday after he mistakenly posted a picture of Gautam Buddha while wishing his followers on Mahavir Jayanti. Not surprisingly, Twitter users wasted no time in lampooning him.

Mahavir Jayanti, celebrated across India on Thursday, marks the birth anniversary of the 24th Tirthankara of Jainism—Lord Mahavira.

Later, Tharoor also tweeted the source for the picture. He wrote, "At least, thanks to my apparent error, a lot more people are tweeting on Mahavira than they would otherwise have!"

Several people mocked Tharoor after his tweets, some of them by posting pictures of festivals and referring to them as belonging to a different religious tradition.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Ram Nath Kovind too wished the country on Mahavir Jayanti.

“On Mahavir Jayanti I bow to the venerable Lord Mahavir, who showed the path of peace and welfare for entire humanity,” the prime minister tweeted this morning.

Kovind called on people to draw inspiration from Lord Mahavir's life to spread love and harmony in the world.

"Greetings to fellow citizens, especially to our Jain community, on Mahavir Jayanti. The teachings of Lord Mahavira are relevant and significant to this day. Let us draw inspiration from his life to spread love and harmony in the world", he said.

With inputs from PTI