The assorted trolls of the Congress party, joined by Aam Aadmi Party IT cell, on Thursday embarrassed themselves on social media as they tried to weave a conspiracy theory to claim that the attack on Republic TV editor by the Congress workers was staged.
Republic TV Editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami was attacked on the wee hours of Thursday at 12:15 AM by Congress workers in Mumbai. The attack by Congress party workers against Arnab Goswami had come as a result after Sonia Gandhi was questioned by the senior journalist over her silence on Palghar mob lynching.
Attack was pre-planned: Congress IT cell
However, according to the trolls, the attack on Arnab Goswami was a planned one as netizens had allegedly revealed the information much before Republic TV had put out an official tweet from its Twitter handle. The trolls took to Twitter to claim that attack on Arnab Goswami was a fake one as Right-wing social media users had already known about the attack much before it was revealed by the channel.
Rifait Jawaid, an Aam Aadmi Party supporter who claims to be a journalist, claimed that BJP leader Sambit Patra and Ashoke Pandit had tweeted about the attack before Republic TV broke the story.
Look at these three tweets. Sambit Patra and Ashoke Pandit tweeted about the ‘attack’ even before Republic TV broke the story! How on earth can this happen? pic.twitter.com/zvdx6nZCpB
— Rifat Jawaid (@RifatJawaid) April 23, 2020
Congress worker Vinay Kumar Dokania also resorted to spread the same lies asking whether Sambit Patra knew before Republic TV was aware of the attacks.
How Did @sambitswaraj know before his own channel that Arnab has been attacked?#DramaBandKarArnab pic.twitter.com/nMtyqZWwFP
— Vinay Kumar Dokania🇮🇳 | विनय कुमार डोकानिया (@VinayDokania) April 22, 2020
Another Congress troll also came up with conspiracy theories that filmmaker Ashoke Pandit knew ten minutes before the attack took place.
Ashoke Pandit knew about attack on Arnab a full ten minutes before it supposedly happened 😂
— Srivatsa (@srivatsayb) April 23, 2020
These #PaidNazi enthu cutlets of BJP IT cell started posting their drafted tweet much before they were supposed to
Arnab hire better scriptwriters and directors next time. pic.twitter.com/SQuk870KHJ
However, the claims made by the Congress IT cell is just another falsehood. If you observe closely, BJP leader Sambit Patra had tweeted about the attacks on Arnab Goswami at 01:05 AM and filmmaker Ashoke Pandit had tweeted the same at 12:55 AM.
Even though the official tweet from the Republic TV was put out at 01:06, the news of Congress workers attacking Arnab Goswami was already being telecast live on Republic TV from around 12:35.
Here is a visual of Republic TV broadcasting the news of attack on Arnab Goswami at 12:42.
This image bursts propaganda of the Congress IT cell, which was making false claims based on the timeline of tweets made by social media users, to claim that the attack on Arnab Goswami was a pre-planned one.
Congress IT cell’s Gaurav Pandhi made another allegation saying that a video message of Arnab Goswami after the attack was made hours before the attack took place. He posted a screenshot of metadata of the video, which showed that the video was created at 8:17 PM yesterday.
But this claim is so baseless that even pro-Congress pro-AAP Alt News founder Pratik Sinha had to point out that this is wrong analysis because Twitter strips all metadata from media files uploaded to the site. Moreover, the screenshot of the metadata of the video being circulated by Congressis do not show the time zone, so it can’t be claimed that it is Indian time. And as servers of Twitter and most other websites are located outside India, they do not show Indian time. Most servers record the time in UTC, which is 5.30 hours behind India time. Therefore, if the video was uploaded at 8:17 PM UTC, the Indian time would be 1:47 AM, which is almost one and a half hour after the incident.
Attack on Arnab Goswami
In a shocking incident, Republic TV Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami was attacked by two goons in the wee hours of the night.
In the intervening night of 22nd and 23rd April, Arnab Goswami and his wife were driving back home when two bike-borne assailants attacked their car. According to Republic TV, the goons confessed that they were from Congress and the attack took place only 500 meters away from Goswami’s residence.
Following the horrific attack on him, Republic TV’s Editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami released a video narrated the incident.
Narrating the incident, Arnab Goswami said that he and his wife were driving back to their residence around 12.15 AM at Ganpatrao Kadam Marg when two bike-borne attacked him. Arnab added that his security detail later informed him that the attackers belonged to Youth Congress workers, who confessed that they were given instructions by their higher-ups to carry out the attack.
In a video released after the attack, Arnab went on to hold Sonia Gandhi personally responsible for the attack while asserting that neither he or his network will be cowed down by the attack.
“I will hold you personally responsible for any consequences and any attack on me. If anything ever happens to me, it is Sonia Gandhi and Vadra family, who cannot take my questions, are responsible,” had added Arnab Goswami.
