Vinod Dua, a left-wing propagandist accused of sexually harassing a filmmaker has come back with another set of fake news to pursue propaganda against Union Minister Nitin Gadkari and the NDA by doctoring one of Gadkari’s interviews.
On December 21, HW News, where Vinod Dua joined recently, published an exclusive interview with Union Minister Nitin Gadkari. In the interview, Gadkari talked about how hundreds of projects were stalled when he took over the charge of the ministry, and how he revived the projects with various measures.
Vinod Dua used Gadkari’s comments in the interview in episode 7 of his video blog titled The Vinod Dua Show to suggest that Gadkari was blaming his own government for stalled projects. Dua’s show contains a clip of the interview where Gadkari is blaming the government, but does not say which government. Dua goes on to say that this proves growing dissent in the BJP, and suggests after Arun Shourie, Yashwant Sinha, Shatrughan Sinha etc, now people from RSS like Nitin Gadkari are also speaking against the government.
According to Dua, Gadkari, who is now Ministry of Water Resources, River Development & Ganga Rejuvenation, stated that there were 403 stalled projects concerning the department and 75% of those projects were stalled due to the policies of the government.
But now it has emerged that Dua used a carefully edited portion of Gadkari’s interview to create an impression of a rift in BJP. Dua carefully edits the video to claim that the ‘government’ which Gadkari referred to was the present NDA government led by Narendra Modi.
Responding to Vinod Dua’s comments, Nitin Gadkari’s office posted the full video of that portion of the interview, where it is clearly seen that Nitin Gadkari was indeed talking about mismanagement during UPA government. The original clip exposes Vinod Dua’s propaganda as Gadkari in his interview goes on to say that it was UPA government’s policy paralysis which had affected the completion of the projects. Gadkari in his interview clearly states that the UPA government had not issued any environmental clearances to various infrastructure projects. In the interview, Gadkari also added that how he addressed the issue of stalled projects and reduced NPAs after taking charge of the department contrary to Dua’s claims of increase of stalled projects during NDA government.
After the rebuttal by Nitin Gadkari, episode 7 of Nitin Gadkari has been removed from both HW news website and Youtube where the show is hosted. The link to the page on the website returns a 404 error.
The full interview of Gadkari is still there on the HW News website, which clearly shows that he was blaming UPA government. Despite that, Vinod Dua chose to use an edited portion of the interview to build a fake narrative about a fictitious rift in the party.
Vinod Dua’s attempt to discredit the NDA government led by Prime Minister Modi by using a doctored video is not surprising as Dua has a track record of resorting to this sort of unethical and shoddy journalism to target the BJP. Vinod Dua, who was earlier associated with another left-wing propaganda news website The Wire had successfully managed to peddle their false narratives without being held accountable.
Vinod Dua has also been accused of sexually harassing and molesting a filmmaker Nishtha Jain. After Nishitha Jain accused Dua, another lady filmmaker Sunita Thakur had come forward and accused Dua of inappropriate behaviour.
Despite these allegations, Dua had continued to publish videos for propaganda website The Wire and Dua had described the allegations of sexual harassment on himself as ‘keechad‘ (mud) virtually claiming that women coming out with their accounts of sexual harassment were indulging in mudslinging.
