The ‘anti-nationals’ at JNU and the rampaging anti-nationals in Haryana have kept politicians and journalists busy one way or the other.
Professor Virender, a close aide of former Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda faces allegations of instructing a Khap leader to instigate violence in the state.
The Congress has ordered an inquiry, but Professor Virender insists the audio leak is selective, out of context and doctored.
An expected response, but the otherwise ‘take-a-stand-or-die’ kind of news channels are being wary of passing any judgement on the audio leak. For now.
This could possibly be because of the series of unverified falsehoods that, bereft of any caveats, have been passed off as news recently.
Same Pose, Different Background
The original photograph of Kanhaiya Kumar was picked up from Facebook, photoshopped and placed in front of a map of a divided India. The Urdu text, added to Kanhaiya’s ‘secessionist’, ‘seditious’ image was emblazoned across social media and select news channels.
One can respect the artistic license, but not when it comes to the life of a young scholar, his lawyer and his family, who’ve all been under threat since his arrest.
Raise Your Flag
So what if it’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph shot by Joe Rosenthal that became a symbol of the American victory over the island of Iwo Jima in the Indian Ocean. An enduring icon, the photograph has been used as a model for the Iwo Jima Memorial in Arlington, Virginia and has also been commemorated on an American stamp.
It was reduced to a joke on The Newshour Debate with Arnab Goswami when BJP’s National Spokesperson Sambit Patra held up a photoshopped version of the iconic photograph with the Indian tricolour, instead of the American ‘star-spangled banner’, and said ‘Look at our Indian soldiers”.
Azadi from False Propaganda, Please
If the embarrassment of exhibiting a photoshopped image was not enough, Sambit Patra urged Times Now Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami to air the video that he was in possession of. Next came a long crusade against his poor Wi-Fi connection to bring to light an India News video showing Kanhaiya shouting “Azadi! Azadi!”
The unedited video shows Kanhaiya demanding Azadi from poverty, RSS, feudalism, casteism, capitalism and communalism.
2014 Sweepstakes
The BJP literally decimated the Congress in the 2014 General Election. But not before an RTI query revealed this photograph, that was widely circulated on social media in the run-up to the election, was photoshopped. The morphed image did its part in propagating Modi’s image as a dedicated RSS worker who worked his way up from the bottom.
Repeat Offenders
The Press Information Bureau photoshopped, or as it insisted “merged” two photographs to drive home the point that Prime Minister Modi had visited flood-hit Chennai.
Later, it was revealed, that the PIB was a repeat offender, having photoshopped, sorry, merged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s photo when he conducted an aerial survey of flood-hit Assam.