Meet the 30-minute Prime Minister of India

Mumbai: Quaiser Ali, a 19-year-old Indian teen and ‘entrepreneur’, managed to acquire the twitter handle of the Prime Minister for almost half an hour on May 20 and also did some tweeting.

The 19-year-old Lucknow resident, who tried to get into IIT but was unlucky twice, is a young entrepreneur. He started his own mini-social networking website ‘Picxter’ at the age of 18, hoping that the website would make him the next billionaire like Mark Zuckerberg of FaceBook.

According to media reports, a few days ago, he was resetting his own twitter handle @Iamqaiserali to a new name. He realised that at the same moment, the Prime Minister’s Office had also reset its official Twitter handle from @PMOIndia to @PMOIndiaArchive. This made the older handle (@PMOIndia) available for use.

The @PMOIndia Twitter handle was started by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s office, which got millions of followers to that account. Later, as he left the office, the PMO team had to handover the account to the new Prime Minster, Narendra Modi, who wanted to convert the account’s messages into an older archive and restart the same account as a fresh new one. The @PMOIndia handle was changed to @PMOIndiaArchive, along with all followers and messages with it. During this phase, Twitter India did not block the older handle, which made it available. Unfortunately, Ali was at the same moment changing his twitter handle and managed to get his hands on it.  

Ali did not know the consequences and took hold of the Twitter handle as his own and started Tweeting from it, boasting of his new acquisition. Ali just wanted to give his Twitter handle a better name. "I don't know how but it came into my mind to check PMO [Prime Minister's Office] of India, and when I realised it was available, I saved it for myself," he told BBC Trending.

For Qaiser, his tenure as a “Prime Minster of India” was short-lived and lasted just 30-minutes before he gave up the Twitter handle and apologised to all the people of India. "I was shocked, honoured, but also scared. I'm just a 19-year-old kid from India, and this is a government matter. When they found out, my parents scolded me and told me to apologise to all the people of India," he says.

 

Apology for taking the name of @PMOIndia . I did it because it was vacant . Apologies . @abpnewstv

— Qaiser (@iamqaiserali) May 20, 2014