The management of Madame Tussauds wax museum at New York City was panic-stricken for a brief while, after footage captured by a CCTV camera showed the work-in-progress statue of PM Narendra Modi gazing at it intently. A spokesperson for the museum said that something like this had happened for the first time and the authorities are investigating the matter.

“We’re not going to be taking this lightly. Our museums haven’t really been haunted, but we don’t want to blindly rule out the possibility. Those eyes that were looking into the camera were a little too intense. I don’t know if it was the positioning of the statue or if it was the way the face of the statue was made. Or something else. We’ll have to wait and see. Our staff’s totally petrified though,” an official statement from the museum read.

The incident has been slammed by liberals and intellectuals across India, who felt that it was a sign of the times. “It’s time for the US to get a taste of the real Modi and what better way than this! Even a statue of the man indulges in such fear-mongering, imagine the scale with which the real person is inducing fear in India then,” a leading intellectual told The UnReal Times.

Meanwhile, sources at the PMO are looking into the possibility of the PM’s hologram being super-imposed on the statue. “We’re told that BJP president Amit Shah was snoo..err..monitoring the museum happenings through the CCTV camera. It seems he wanted a glimpse of how the final statue would look, so he generated a 3D hologram of the PM and superimposed it on the statue. To make it 100% realistic, he is supposed to have tilted the eyes towards the camera. It looks like he forgot to turn the hologram off. Anyway, this is yet to be confirmed. Let’s see,” a PMO spokesperson said.

The PM himself, while refusing to comment on the matter, mentioned that CCTV, after all, stood for “Cunning Camera Trapping Vision.” In related news, a wax statue of Indian liquor baron Vijay Mallya is reported to have been missing from the Madame Tussauds museum in London.

The Aam Aadmi Party, however, got into the act, with spokesperson The Ashutosh tweeting, “I want to ask the Madam Tusshar what the Modi did in her museum !!! She sud answer !!!” (sic)