The incident occurred when Shashi Tharoor, a former Under Secretary-General at the UN and senior Congress party leader, erroneously related 18th Century Urdu-Persian poet Mirza Ghalib with a couplet on what he thought was the poet's 220th birthday.
Except it wasn't Ghalib's birthday. Lyricist Javed Akhtar, a well-known Urdu writer and poet himself, was quick to catch Tharoor’s gaffe.
Realising the embarrassing situation he was in, Tharoor likened his blunder to every clever quotation being attributed to Churchill.
Tharoor admitted to the mistake, saying he was misinformed.
Javed Akhtar came to his rescue and suggested that someone was trying to sabotage his literary credibility.
The Twitterati joined Tharoor and quoted the wrong lines to the poet Ghalib, whose birthday actually falls on 27 December. Akhtar, however, urged them to stop misquoting Ghalib.
Others found the chance to mock the Congress leader for his mistakes, saying such mistake weren’t expected from him.