The Indian National Congress (INC) headed by President Rahul Gandhi has been famed to be going through a digital revolution. Post the 2014 elections where Congress was lagging behind in capitalising on the digital and social media space, the party has made headway in making its mark on social media. With their several gaffes in the past, Congress has certainly surged ahead on social media. Today, it emerged that Gujarat Congress in their official website, in their ‘Join Us’ section have mentioned that Congress ‘looted India for 70 years’ and called the party a ‘party of thugs’.
Twitter user Amit posted a screenshot of what he claimed was the Gujarat Congress website. In the screenshot, Gujarat Congress, in their ‘Join Us’ section had described Congress party as a “party that looted India for 70 years”. It went on to call Congress a ‘party of thugs’.
Gujarat Congress is so brutally honest in describing themselves.
Says party looted india for 70 years and don’t think you can become party president because for that u need to be a gandhi family member and a ret*rd ???
Here is the linkhttps://t.co/iStJtzfrxZ pic.twitter.com/Zonf0COTE3
— AMIT (@AMIT_GUJJU) February 18, 2019
Amusingly, the website allegedly also said that people should join Gujarat Congress if they wish to ‘destroy’ the state of Gujarat.
The website also said that people who join should not dream of becoming Congress party president because for that one has to be a Gandhi and a “retard” in the first place.
Since it was inexplicable why an official Congress website would write these words, we decided to dig a little deeper to confirm whether this was true or not.
When we went to the official, verified Twitter handle of Gujarat Congress, the website that was displayed in their official page was gujaratcongress.in. The very page that Twitter user Amit had linked back in his tweet.
When we tried to visit the website, however, the webpage was not loading. The message displayed
After we failed to get access to the website, we tried to look for the cache version of the website gujaratcongress.in. However, by the time we archived the cache version, the second half of the text had been changed.
The text of the website now reads (emphasis ours):
“Become a part of the oldest and largest political party in India who looted India for 70 years. Originally founded by the British rulers in the country, the party evolved into the natural party of thugs after independence and a custodian and champion of anti nationalizm. If you believe in Congress ideology and want to join us in our endeavour of better Gujarat please fill up the following form”.
Even though the latter half of the text had been changed by the time we took the archive of the website, the first half, that called Congress a ‘party of thugs’ and a party that ‘looted India for 70 years’ was still there. An additional line that read “custodian and champion of anti nationalizm” was added.
Now, as we said earlier, the website is inaccessible.
Given the first half of the text was still intact calling Congress a ‘party of thugs’ was still intact, one would imagine that the earlier version, a screenshot of which was attached by Amit was also true. Perhaps by the time we took the archive, whoever was responsible for changing the website text had changed the text again.
The only question that now remains is who changed the text of the official website of Gujarat Congress. One wonders if it was some dissident from within the Congress party who was managing the website or their website was hacked. The Congress party has not clarified what happened till the time this article was published.
