In an earlier report by Opindia, we busted the false narrative of the online portal ‘The Quint’ against Sr Sri Ravi Shankar and his organization The Art of Living.
In a well-edited video, ‘The Quint’ showed the testimonials from the farmers who claim in the video that they are unable to grow crops on the floodplain. The Quint in an attempt to sensationalize stories has tactfully distorted and hidden facts revealed by the innocent farmer’s. Our volunteers travelled to the area and spoke to the farmers regarding the issue. We also spoke to the same farmers that ‘The Quint’ spoke to, and the tale that emerged was extremely different. It seems that ‘The Quint’ has resorted to blatant lies and showing doctored and edited statements of the farmers. In some cases, they even misled farmers into believing that it was because of Sri Sri that they were not being allowed to farm when the truth is extremely different.
In this video report, what the farmers said to The Quint and what they later revealed has been juxtaposed to display the plain untruthfulness of The Quint’s report.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCwspAFOuyo]
This video clearly shows that a women farmer named Haravati was hired by the landowner Ram Singh to farm on his land and he had the permission to harvest on that particular land uninterrupted, while The Quint had misconstrued the video showing Haravati as the landowner and not being able to use her own land for farming.
She is also seen admitting to being misinformed by The Quint and for trying to put words in her mouth, which was later clarified by us. The lady is heard clearly stating that she was informed by the reporters of The Quint that the land on which she was farming was sold to Sri Sri which is a blatant lie. Later she was informed that it was actually the DDA which had restricted farming on the land.
The second farmer Sukhbir Singh, admits that the information which was given by him to ‘The Quint’ was distorted and that his statements were edited out to show the viewers a completely different picture.
The Quint in their video revealed that Sukhbir admitted that the land on which he was harvesting has become absolutely barren after bulldozers were used on it before the World Cultural Festival, but in this video, he is clearly heard saying that ‘This is not true. It’s like that for some time and goes back to normal once it rains for a while. The fertility of the soil is never lost.’
Sukhbir Singh was clearly unhappy with how this media house docketed his interview. He specified that ‘The Quint has just put what they wanted to in the interview and cut everything else out. I talked about the NGT and floodplain, the Yamuna and I also said I don’t have any grievances against towards Sri Sri’.
He also sent a message for ‘The Quint’. Sukhbir said that he is not a political person and that ‘The Quint’ should not edit his comments to turn the matter political.
The Quint has been dangerously purporting lies as truth by using innocent farmers to manufacture fake news. It is perhaps time they understand that real journalism demands to bring out all facets of the story honestly and not indulge in fake propaganda.
