The photograph of a newspaper clipping of a Bengali daily Bartaman, carrying a purported “anti-Hindu” quote of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has gone viral on social media.
The same claim was viral in 2019 and has now resurfaced amid the ongoing Assembly elections in the state.
However, we found that the newspaper clipping was photoshopped and certain words in the headline were replaced with new ones. The original newspaper article, which was published on 20 April 2019, had a different headline from the one in the viral image.
CLAIM
The headline in the newspaper clipping said, “Give us 42 seats we will show how to make Hindus cry: Mamata”.
The image was shared by several people on Facebook and Twitter. The Quint also received the image as a query on our WhatsApp fact-checking tipline.
More archive of Facebook posts with this viral claim can be seen here and here. The same clipping was shared with a similar claim on Twitter back in 2019. A user had written, “If India does not wake up to this grave situation, we will have another Islamic state on our border.” (Archived version of those posts can be found here and here.)
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We ran a reverse image search of the viral photo and found a post by a Facebook user, which carried a different headline than that in the viral photo. The headline in Bangla said, "Give us 42 seats and we will show you how to shake up Delhi: Mamata".
When we looked up the headline, we found the link to the original article published on Bartaman Patrika’s website.
In the viral image, the Bengali word for Delhi (দিল্লী) was removed and had been replaced with word for Hindu (হিন্দু). Similarly, the work for ‘shake up’ (কাঁপাতে) was replaced with the word for cry (কাঁদাতে) in Bengali.
Banerjee made the comments while campaigning for TMC candidate Apurba Sarkar in Berhampur in April 2019.
Evidently, an edited newspaper clipping of a 2019 story was shared to create a false narrative that West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee made an anti-Hindu statement while campaigning during the elections.
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