In another embarrassment for Pakistan, one of its senior officials has made a social media blunder while attempting to disparage India’s space programme. Head of Pakistan Army’s media wing, Major General Asif Ghafoor on Twitter made a major mathematical miscalculation and ended up inflating the worth of the second Chandrayaan-2 mission by almost a 100 times.
“Loss of 900 Billions to indian govt for losing communication with #Chandrayan2. How much for blocking communication in IOJ&K? Much much more.... and not financially alone. In Shaa Allah,” tweeted the general.
The only problem is that, the Chandrayaan-2 mission’s actual allocated budget was only Rs 978 crore, which according to the international numbering system would be Rs 9.78 billion and not 900 billion as Ghafoor claimed.
A number of Twitter users took full advantage of this mathematical error to ridicule Ghafoor. He is not the only senior Pakistani official whose bid to mock the Chandrayaan-2 mission badly backfired.
Just yesterday (7 September), Pakistan’s Science and Technology Minister Fawad Chaudhary was trolled relentlessly for an old tweet in which claimed that Pakistan produced the world’s best suicide bombers. Users had dug up his Twitter history after he tried to taunt India over the inability of the final stage of the Chandrayaan-2 mission , the Vikram Rover, to successfully land on the lunar surface.