A Facebook page called ‘Aligarh Muslim University’, was caught promoting the Congress party when the polling for the first phase of Lok Sabha election is going on. Today, the Facebook page posted a message urging everyone to vote. They appealed “all the voters to participate in the biggest festival of democracy and vote in huge numbers”.
They had posted two images along with the message. One of them is a photograph of the Indian national flag. The other image contained the word ‘vote’, and inside the letter o in the word, the Congress party’s symbol is seen.
So Aligarh Muslim University openly endorsing @INCIndia ,
Hi @SpokespersonECI is this allowed?
Cc @PrakashJavdekar @myogiadityanath @BJP4UP pic.twitter.com/MWV0IyJJ9X
— चौकीदार (संवैधानिक डकैत शाखा) (@Shivam_h9) April 11, 2019
Later, the Facebook page deleted the image with Congress symbol, but no before alert social media users taking a screenshot of the post. They retained the post with the image of the flag.
According to Election Commission rules, educational institutions can’t be used by politicians, therefore Facebook page of AMU promoting the Congress party amounts to violations of model code of conduct for the elections.
Although it is not certain whether this is an official page of the university on Facebook, the page has over 63,000 likes and over 62,000 followers. Moreover, the website of the university does not mention any official Facebook account or page, which makes it difficult to determine the authenticity of the page.
Update: Aligarh Muslim University has posted a message on another Facebook page called ‘Aligarh Muslim University News’ that the University does not appeal or support any political party or own any Facebook page or Twitter account or webpage that makes such appeals. The post says that they promote only academic, cultural activity news etc from their pages. They also said they are not responsible or accountable for any misleading posts using the names and logos of AMU.
