An old image of Home Minister Amit Shah dining with Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik is doing the rounds on social media with a claim that it is from a meeting conducted to discuss the upcoming elections in West Bengal.
However, the image is from February 2020 when the home minister travelled to Bhubaneswar to attend a meeting of the Eastern Zonal Council (EZC).
CLAIM
The aforementioned image is being circulated on Facebook and Twitter with a caption which translates to: “Bengal elections being discussed over breakfast. However, people will still call Owaisi a (BJP) agent. You would understand who is an agent of BJP after having a look at this image. All of these people are together and are fooling you.”
The image has surfaced amid allegations of being a ‘vote-cutter’ party or BJP’s ‘B-Team’ being levelled at the All All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) after the recently concluded Bihar elections.
WHAT WE FOUND
The fact that no such meeting between Home Minister Amit Shah and Chief Ministers of Bihar, Bengal and Odisha was reported in the news recently raised the suspicion of The Quint and we ran a reverse image search on the said photograph.
This directed us to several news reports from February 2020 which mentioned that the image is from a meeting of the Eastern Zonal Council (EZC), a forum of eastern states, chaired by the home minister and held at Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik’s residence in Bhubaneshwar.
According to a report by the Hindustan Times dated 28 February, “Mamata Banerjee was in Odisha for the 24th meeting of the Eastern Zonal Council (EZC) chaired by (Amit) Shah. Apart from (Naveen) Patnaik and Banerjee, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan were also present. Jharkhand Finance Minister Rameshwar Oraon, who represented the state in the meeting in the absence of Chief Minister Hemant Soren, did not join them.”
Clearly, an unrelated image from February is being circulated in connection with the upcoming West Bengal Assembly elections.
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