On Monday (July 31), the official Twitter handle of the Congress party committed a faux pas after it posted a picture of an UPA-era road to shame the incumbent Modi government at the Centre.
In a tweet (archive), it wrote, “The truth is far from false promises (jumla).” The Twitter handle shared three images, with the captions ‘How India should be’, ‘How India is’ and ‘How PM Modi portrays it.’
In its desperate bid to target the Modi government, the Congress party attached a picture of a poorly constructed road that dated back to the UPA era. The image featured a crater-sized pothole in the middle of the road with a truck stuck under it. It was accompanied by the caption ‘How India is’.
The grand-old party suggested that Indian roads, under the Modi government, were in poor condition and thus unfit for commutation. The disturbing image of potholes, in the middle of the road, was added to portray misrule and mismanagement by the Centre under the current political dispensation.
Interestingly, the image used for making such an insinuation has been around for over a decade. A quick Google reverse image search led us to a blog named ‘Cute Pictures Gallery.’ The image, bearing the watermark of ‘My India pictures,’ was uploaded on September 24, 2012.
Another WordPress blog named ‘Ashwin Sharma’ also posted the same image in November 2012.
In October 2019, the French international news agency AFP conducted a fact-check and determined that the image was indeed from India. The electric poles on both sides had advertisements in Hindi, with one written as ‘Gemini Circus.’
AFP also noted that the images have been on the internet since 2012. Interestingly, the Modi government came to power at the Centre only in May 2014 i.e. 2 years after the image had first made it to the sites mentioned above. At that time, the Congress-led UPA government was in power.
While the grand-old party wanted to taunt the BJP government over the condition of roads, it was left embarrassed after people realised that the pictures were taken during the UPA era. Despite the misleading character of the images, the official handle of Congress did not bother to delete the tweet or cite an apology.
