He always has some food for thought (read bizarre thought) to offer the Twitterati.

Tripura, the small landlocked state in north-eastern India, took 25 long years to turn saffron from red, but the well-built gym instructor, now the first BJP chief minister of the state, who had earlier sent his opponents into rigor mortis with the full force of the saffron battle cry, nudged them back to life with the full force of the saffron version of revisionist history.

Consider this selection from Tripura chief minister Biplab Kumar Deb’s public statements covering, in a relentless sweep, lessons in history, sermons on family life and tips on governance.

“Under our government, the Chabimura tourist spot will become like the Amazon river basin of Africa.”

“Chanakya taught at the ancient university (Nalanda) situated in present-day Bihar. Chanakya also taught at Taxila, the ruins of which are found in present-day Pakistan.”

“The famous Chinese traveller Hiuen Tsang who visited India in the ancient times was a journalist.”

“A person who is not a good homemaker, can’t keep his own family happy, can never make the country happy, can’t be a good chief minister, neither can he be a good prime minister.”

No wonder then that Biplab Deb (48), oozing good health and dashing looks in his trademark crisp kurta-pajama and billed as a soft spoken, no-nonsense RSS volunteer sometime back, has become Twitterati’s delight. Whenever Deb shares some gem from his book of wisdom – and he does that quite frequently – they just lap it up and go into a tizzy. The opposition, just vanquished in the state elections, is having a quiet laugh. Other detractors and Twitterati are having a field day.

The traditional and social media spaces are literally engulfed with Deb’s frenetically retweeted remarks, that have betrayed symptoms of the rarest form of foot in the mouth disease: claiming that Sanjaya’s vivid and real time description of the distant battle of Kurukshetra to Dhritirashtra indicated the presence of the internet and satellite communications in India in the age of the Mahabharata; questioning the crowning of model Diana Hayden as Miss World because she, unlike Aishwarya Bachchan, did not look like goddess Lakshmi or Saraswati; mixing up civil engineering with civil service as he advised the state’s bureaucrats on civil services day that mechanical engineers should stay away from the civil service; threatening to pull out the nails of anyone who criticised his government.

The latest is his solution to the state’s unemployment problem. “Stop chasing government jobs and, instead, rear cows or set up paan shops,” he said at a seminar organised by the Tripura Veterinary Council only last week. Mind you that during his entire campaign trail, Deb had delved at length on the subject of youth employment opportunities and promised to improve the situation if voted to power.

Deb, who took oath as the 10th chief minister of the state after dethroning the CPI(M)’s Manik Sarkar, was trained under RSS ideologue KN Govindacharya and spent years in Delhi learning the ropes of political action. He describes Prime Minister Narendra Modi as his ‘political guru’. He is not given to apologies. Not even after telling about Diana Hayden, “She became the Miss World and that’s all right. But, I do not understand the beauty of Diana Hayden,” said Deb. And pat came Hayden’s response: “With regard to me winning the Miss World, it’s a pity and shame, that when you win the biggest and most respected beauty pageant in the world, you get criticised and put down as opposed to being appreciated and respected for bringing more accolades back home and further appreciation of our Indian brown exotic beauty.”

If you think Deb’s predilection for committing faux pas was triggered by his chief ministerial responsibilities, you are wrong. In the run-up to the last assembly elections, Deb, then the state

BJP chief, had said at a rally in Khowai district that any vote cast in the EVMs for the CPI (M), even by the then chief minister Manik Sarkar, would go to the BJP. It was at a time when there had already been a raging debate across the country over possible EVM tampering.

On Buddha Purnima, his first after becoming chief minister, Deb launched into another lecture on history. According to him, Gautam Buddha had spread the message of peace, harmony and prosperity by walking across India and going to places that are now known as Myanmar, Japan and Tibet. Those remarks invited swift intellectual rebuttals. However, those counters were not to the Tripura chief minister’s detriment. He has got the wholehearted support of his governor, Tathagata Roy, and boasts that the Prime Minister treats him like a son. That should give him enough political heft to move effortlessly to his next series of gaffes.