On Sunday (May 7), ‘journalist’ Ravish Kumar took to Facebook to fear-monger about ‘missing’ 40000 women from the Indian State of Gujarat.
While sharing the screenshot of a misleading article by The New Indian Express, he wrote, “Ask Narendra Modi, where did the girls of Gujarat disappear? Can Modi, who talks about the pride of 6 crores Gujaratis, tell us about the whereabouts of 40000 missing girls?”
The propaganda artist then went on to dub Gujarat, the ‘laboratory of Hindu Rahstra.’ He inquired, “Which experiment is being run in this laboratory of Hindu Rahstra to disappear girls?”
In a bid to spread hysteria, Ravish Kumar further asked, “Isn’t this dangerous? What could have happened?” The ‘journalist’ who pretends to be a harbinger of ‘truth’ carefully left out a key piece of information i.e. 94.9% (~95%) of the missing women have been found by the Gujarat police.
The half-baked information about 40000 ‘missing’ women was amplified by the left-liberal ecosystem in the hopes of deviating public discourse from ‘The Kerala Story’ to Gujarat.
In a series of tweets, the Gujarat police informed that while 41,621 women had gone missing between 2016-2020, about 39,497 or approximately 95% of the women were traced and reunited with their families.
published by National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB), New Delhi, 39,497 (94.90%) of the missing women have been traced by Gujarat Police and they are united with their families. The said information is also part of Crime in India, 2020.
— Gujarat Police (@GujaratPolice) May 8, 2023
“The investigation has revealed that women go missing due to family disputes, elopement, failure in examinations etc. However, the investigation into missing person cases has not revealed episodes of trafficking for sexual exploitation, organ trafficking etc,” the police emphasised.
This was stated in reference to propaganda artists, who targeted Gujarat and drew an equivalence with assertions made in The Kerala Story movie that over 30,000 women had gone missing in the State and had possibly become victims of Islamic radicalisation.
After being left red-faced, Ravish Kumar took to Facebook on Tuesday (May 9) to do damage control and restore his dwindling credibility. The ex-NDTV news anchor shrewdly blamed his lack of due diligence on the contentious article published by The New Indian Express.
In his Facebook post, he wrote, “According to Gujarat police, 94% of missing women have been traced.” This is despite the fact that 94.9% or approximately 95% of missing women were recovered by the cops.
“Besides this success of the Gujarat police, we must introspect about the cause of exodus/ abduction/disappearance of such a large number of women,” Ravish Kumar acknowledged the mammoth task undertaken by the cops half-heartedly.
“The other side of The New Indian Express report of 40000 missing women is that most of them have been traced,” he shrewdly laid the foundation to blame the newspaper and absolve himself of any wrongdoing.
“The paper did not mention the other facet of the case and exposed us to half-baked information. Correcting the mistake,” Ravish Kumar concluded.
Ravish Kumar and his history of peddling disinformation
This is not the first time that ‘Ramon Magsaysay’ awardee had resorted to peddling misleading information and half-truths. In May 2020, Ravish Kumar shared a fake cover of Time magazine to target Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
In January 2021, he had to apologise to the public for spreading fake news about paddy procurement by the Union government. The eminent ‘journalist’ cropped a tweet by Minister Piyush Goyal to falsely claim that the Centre was lying about the data.
In the past, Ravish Kumar has tried to pass off ‘anti-Hindu Delhi riot’ accused Shahrukh Pathan as ‘Anurag Mishra.’ He had also courted controversy for claiming ‘mob has no religion,’ following the Bengaluru riots, but effectively blaming the Hindu community for the lynching of Pehlu Khan.
