CLAIM
A message is being shared on social media with the claims that West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee criticised ISRO harshly, after they lost communication with Chandrayaan-2’s Vikram lander ahead of its attempt to make the scheduled soft landing on the surface of the Moon. The message, in Bengali is: “যে কাজটা পারবেন না সেটা করতে যাবার দরকার নেই ইসরো কে বললেন মমতা” (There is no need for you to try and undertake what you cannot accomplish, said Mamata to ISRO)
The message was shared widely on Facebook.
Twitter wasn’t far behind either.
On Twitter, people were sharing the message with the link to a website, where an article in Bengali which claimed that Mamata had made this comment on Twitter and questioned how she could do so as an Indian. Interestingly, the website appeared to be a blog run by India Today.
WHAT IS THE TRUTH?
This claim is actually false and Mamata never made any such comment. However, a tweet was made along similar lines by Pakistan minister Fawad Chaudhry after the Vikram lander went incommunicado. This has been manipulated and attributed to Mamata.
WHAT WE FOUND
Firstly, we noticed that even though the website claimed to be part of India Today, it carried a URL which is indiatodaydailynews.blogspot.com/2019/09/blog-post_62.html . India Today’s existing news website however is: https://www.indiatoday.in/.
Blogspot moreover, is a platform to publish a free blog under a sub domain “example.blogspot.com”. Therefore, anyone can ideally create a blog with the URL much like the blog in question.
Additionally, on scrolling to the end of the the India Today website, we saw that they also had a list of their publications and channels, which did not include the blog mentioned.
This showed that despite the blog using the India Today logo at the top, it is not part of the India Today group.
Secondly, on reading through the blog, we noticed that though it mentioned the exact statement Mamata had allegedly made, they had not attributed it to any source anywhere.
Despite searching for news reports about Mamata criticising ISRO’s alleged failure, we came across none. Even a search through her Twitter profile for any such tweets yielded no results. Instead, we came across tweets where Mamata had congratulated ISRO, saying that India was proud of its scientists.
The Quint found that the comment in question attributed to Mamata is actually a version of what Pakistan’s Science and Technology Minister Fawad Chaudhry had tweeted after the Vikram lander went incommunicado. The tweet had gone viral at the time and grabbed a lot of attention for the criticism he was directing towards India. In his tweet, he had said “ Jo kaam ata nai panga nai leitay na”, which roughly translates to “If you don’t know how to do something then don’t try to act smart”.
Therefore, Chaudhry’s comment has clearly been falsely attributed to Mamata Banerjee.
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