“Whatever happened between me and nun, it is not rape. It is the Holi Ritual of enlightenment to feel the Magical Existence of Holi Jesus at the end of the act,” tweeted Madhu Kishwar.
Kishwar’s tweet comprises of the aforementioned text along with an image of rape accused Bishop Franco Mulakkal. The image also has the logo of ANI.
A complaint of rape was filed against Bishop Franco Mulakkal in June by a nun belonging to the Catholic congregation of missionaries of Jesus in Jalandhar.
Another Facebook user had earlier posted the same image with an identical narrative. This post was shared 6,100 times at the time of writing.
The above image of Bishop Franco Mulakkal with the aforementioned text was circulated by several individuals on Twitter.
What Is the Truth
Alt News did a Twitter search using the keywords, “Holi Ritual of enlightenment” and found the original source of this information. The Unpaid Times was the first to tweet the screenshot of the claim and attributed it to Bishop. Twitter biography of Unpaid Times clearly states that it is an “Indian Satirical News Website”.
However, as it happens so very often, many people fall for such satire and circulate the information believing it to be true. Even in this case, social media users passed off the satirical attempt by the Unpaid Times as factual information.
There are further clues in the above image to suggest that the ‘news’ is not genuine. If one looks closely, the morphed image has a watermark of “breakyourownnews.com” which is a website to generate such ‘stories’. The image circulated by the Unpaid Times is the default news format of the website. Moreover, the spelling of ‘Holy’ in the screenshot was misspelt as ‘Holi’ which was also a giveaway. The Print also had fact-checked the claim.
Another tweet from a parody account, Times How was retweeted by Rajiv Malhotra and @Being_humor, an account run by person called Vinay Sharma. It had got close to 3500 retweets and 4900 ‘likes’ so far.
Social media users should be circumspect about such unsubstantiated claims. In this instance, a close inspection of the image would have shown a website’s watermark and revealed that it wasn’t an actual media report.
(This article was first published on AltNews and has been republished with permission.)
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