Singer Sonu Nigam, who quit X (formerly known as Twitter) nearly seven years ago, has reacted strongly to a user who impersonated him on the microblogging site and shared a political post. Several news publications, without cross checking, published the post as Sonu Nigam's. In the said post, the user wrote about Bharatiya Janata Party's defeat in Uttar Pradesh's Faizabad (Ayodhya) constituency, where Ram Mandir has been built, and called people of Ayodhya 'shameless'.
"The government which beautified the whole of Ayodhya, gave a new airport, railway station, built the Ram temple after 500 years, created an entire temple economy, that party is having to struggle for the Ayodhya seat," the post read. Soon after the post surfaced on X, after the poll results were announced on Tuesday (June 4), Sonu Nigam faced backlash by a section of users.
However, on Wednesday, the singer slammed media portals for mistaking the user for him. "I wonder how people, including the news channels that mistook him for me, didn’t do their basic sanity check by reading the description of the account. His handle says Sonu Nigam Singh and the description says that he’s a criminal lawyer from Bihar," he told Hindustan Times.
He also clarified that he did not make any political remark. "This is the kind of nastiness that forced me to quit Twitter seven years ago. I don’t believe in making sensational political remarks and I only focus on my work. But yeh incident alarming hai, not just for me, but also my family’s safety," he said.
Revealing what action he will take against the user, the singer said, "This user has been doing this for a while. I’m often inundated with screenshots of his tweets from my well-wishers. My team reached out to him and insisted he fixed his handle name and stopped pretending to be me, as millions of people are being mislead by the use of my surname. I’m sure we will find a way to fix this."
The account has been followed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Cabinet Minister Piyush Goyal and other politicians. It has over 59,000 followers.
