After President Ram Nath Kovind gave his assent to the three farm bills passed in Parliament amid protests and agitations by the farmers and the Opposition, several unrelated images from Congress workers’ protests in Kerala in connection with the gold smuggling case are being shared on social media to insinuate that the farmer protests have turned violent.
CLAIM
A set of four images is being circulated with a claim which reads: “किसान आंदोलन हुआ उग्र तस्वीरें आपको भयभीत कर देगी अन्नदाताओं प्र जो अत्याचार हो रहा है यह बिकाऊ मीडिया आपको नहीं दिखाएगा”
[Translation: The farmer agitation turned violent. These images will scare you but the sell-out media won’t show you the atrocities being inflicted on the farmers.]
WHAT WE FOUND
We looked at the images which were being circulated and in one them we could identify Congress MLA VT Jayaraman (the one with a mic in his hand). This hinted that the images could possibly be from Congress protests in Kerala.
Next, we searched Google with keywords “Congress workers protest in Kerala” and found a report by the Hindustan Times which carried the same image of Jayaraman addressing the crowd.
According to the report, protests erupted in several districts of Kerala on 17 September as Opposition parties demanded the resignation of state education minister KT Jaleel, who is being questioned in connection with the Kerala gold smuggling case.
We also found a tweet by Youth Congress which carried all the aforementioned images claiming that “congress workers in Kerala were brutally attacked for protesting against the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government for their involvement in the gold smuggling case”.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor and Youth Congress President Srinival BV had also shared the visuals on Twitter.
Evidently, unrelated images from Opposition protests in Kerala are being circulated as protests by farmers against the new farm laws.
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