Robert Vadra shuts down his Facebook account

Today, a few hours ago, Robert Vadra shut down his Facebook account, after a statement posted by him on his Facebook page created a furore, Firstpost reports. RTI activist-turned-politician, Arvind Kejriwal has slammed corruption allegations against Vadra, who is married to Priyanka, the daughter of UPA chief, Sonia Gandhi. On his Facebook page, Vadra wrote, “Mango people in banana republic”. The post drew ire from India Against Corruption (IAC) activist Kumar Vishwas who demanded an apology from Vadra. Shortly after that, Vadra shut down his Facebook account. 

Vadra shut his Facebook account (Image credit: Getty Images)

As per the report, CNN-IBN quoted Vishwas as saying, “Today Robert Vadra has written ‘mango people in banana republic’ on his Facebook page. He insulted our country because he is related with the most arrogant family, i.e., the Gandhi family. He should apologise before the nation”.

Social media is abuzz with talk of the recent turn of events:

@doctoratlarge: "Robert Vadra has smartly deleted his FB account to divert attention from his SB account #SwissBank"

@madversity: "Robert Vadra has closed his Facebook account. He apparently felt very poked."

@rameshsrivats: "Robert Vadra closes his Facebook Account. I suppose he'll now move to Google Plus for some peace and solitude."

@RaheelK: "Robert Vadra has shut down his Facebook account. Some evasive action that. Well played."

Facebook is a popular and widely used platform in the country. The social networking giant is now officially a billion users strong. There are now one billion active monthly users on Facebook, and the California-based company has stated in its fact sheet that it arrived at this milestone last month. India is among the top five user countries, followed by Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States in that order.

Facebook has presented some of its key metrics in its fact sheet. Facebook has registered over 1.13 trillion Likes, and made 140.3 billion friend connections. A whopping 219 billion photos have been uploaded on Facebook since its launch. The data for calculating this number was extracted on September 10, 2012 and takes into consideration the total number of photos that are on the site currently. It does not factor in deleted or removed photos. If it did, the estimates would go up considerably to 265 billion photos uploaded on Facebook ever.