CLAIM
Congress Spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi on Monday, 12 January, shared several images to showcase the crowd that had purportedly gathered at Priyanka Gandhi’s maiden roadshow in Lucknow.
Congress general secretary and in-charge of East Uttar Pradesh Priyanka Gandhi and party President Rahul Gandhi had held a mega roadshow in the state capital on Monday.
TRUE OR FALSE?
While three of the images shared by Chaturvedi are from the roadshow, the photo on the top right corner (see above) is actually from another rally. Chaturvedi's tweet has since been deleted.
A reverse google image search revealed that the old image was tweeted out by Mohammad Azharuddin, the working president of the Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee on 5 December 2018, when he was campaigning for state Assembly elections.
According to his tweet, the photo of the crowd was taken when Azharuddin – a former cricketer – was campaigning in Gajwel, Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao's constituency.
The same image was inaccurately used by Chaturvedi to show the size of the crowd that had gathered at the Lucknow roadshow, which was also Priyanka Gandhi’s debut rally as a party office bearer.
On Twitter, several people called out Chaturvedi for misleading others to further a political narrative.
AGE-OLD PRACTICE
Sharing old photos of crowds to pass off as genuine support is a practice followed by political parties across lines.
Similarly, in the run-up to the Rajasthan elections, old photos from 2013 were falsely used to showcase the crowd that had attended Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Jodhpur rally on 4 December 2018.
In another incident, after the Bulandhshahr violence, social media posts with photos of large crowds claimed people had gathered in the town for Ijtema (congregation). Only, these photos were really from Africa, as was clearly visible from their attire.
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