In the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, when all political parties are coming up with creative campaigns to lure voters, the grand old party-Congress came up with a shoddily made video with superimposed images Rahul Gandhi’s recently declared ‘NYAY’ scheme on the foreground and how every section of the society stands to benefit from it.
Our national, cross platform, multimedia campaign is now LIVE.
With the concept of NYAY at its core, this campaign builds on the promises we’ve made to the people of India in our manifesto.
Please SHARE as widely as you can. #AbHogaNYAY pic.twitter.com/UE7aVOl4pc
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) April 8, 2019
However, much like Congress’ past promises, this too turned out to be a sham. The video displays homophobic tendency of the party as they have removed the word ‘Gay’ from an image used in the video. At around 0:43 in the above Congress’ promotional video shared by Rahul Gandhi, the video displays a picture of a couple in front of an image showing few people holding a placard saying “I am here to stay…”. But now it has emerged that the photograph was taken at a protest by LGBT community, and the word ‘Gay’ was mentioned in the placard, which was digitally erased while making the video as can be seen below:-
The original image shows that the placard said, “I am Gay, here to stay, even in jail”. But the image has been disingenuously edited by the Congress party by erasing the word ‘Gay’. The image is from a 2013 demonstration march organised by the LGBT community to register their protest against the Supreme Court’s verdict regarding section 377 that overturned the lower court’s order decriminalising homosexuality. The image is credited to Hindustan Times via Getty Images.
It can be clearly seen that this same image was used to create the Congress video. However, what is truly appalling is the insensitivity displayed by Congress in photoshopping the word ‘Gay’ in their promotional video. It, perhaps, removed the word Gay from the image fearing a backlash from a certain section of its core supporters. So though in the video Congress talks about spreading love and ensuring equality for all sections of the society, in reality, the quiet removal of the word ‘Gay’ from their video exposes their inherent hypocrisy and displays their latent homophobia for the LGBTQ community.
