“The central vista matter is part of a larger 6-page document which had a background note on issues facing the nation. Everything in it is already in the public domain and consistent with our stand. They seem to have obtained it illegally, and used it as a model to create a fake document, with forged letterhead.” Gowda said.The first part of the alleged toolkit, however, was the questionable one that many fact-checkers had already flagged as being “suspicious.” It asked Congress supporters to use the term ‘super spreader Kumbh’, ‘not comment on Eid gatherings, respond to COVID SOS messages only if a person tags the IYC handle, use dramatic pictures of cremations and use ‘Modi strain’ for the new variant of COVID. It specifically also asked social media volunteers to use Kumbh pictures to make them look like BJP’s “political show of power” and Eid gatherings as “delightful family occasions.”Marking Patra’s post as “manipulated,” Twitter’s policy said that tweets that “share synthetic and manipulated media” are subject to removal if they likely threaten the physical safety of a person or group or pose a risk of mass violence or widespread civil unrest. Congress has already filed a police complaint accusing BJP of trying to create communal unrest by spreading a fake document.The fallout of the battle was such that even head of juna akhara Avdeshnanand Giri wrote a piece criticising “the unfair discourse of Kumbh mela aggravating the pandemic.” “We took one look at it and we knew it was fake. Every document that we create that goes from here goes through proper scrutiny. We will take this to court as this is not the first time they have tried to vilify us, call us anti nationals to digress from actual issues. It is shameful that instead of taking me on, they launched an online attack on a woman member of our research staff,” Gowda told ET.He added that in the midst of a grave pandemic, ministers and CMs were trying to amplify a fake document and blame the Congress, instead of focussing on Covid-19 management. “This whole story is about diversion. Instead, we have provided constructive criticism, but they have always responded with contempt. What they did was straight out of the BJP’s toolkit to brand critics as anti nationals.”Technology and forensic experts have advised caution when it comes to trusting documents shared online.Debayan Gupta, assistant professor of computer science at Ashoka University told ET, “Just as a regular person in these times, I don’t want to trust screenshots. In this case, it looked particularly manipulative..””When you download any document from anywhere, particularly a pdf file, it comes with its share of metadata where it was created and other details. In this case, the document had no complex source but just said whatsapp. It was absolutely clear it was a manipulated file because it was like saying here is a link to a youtube video but the link is actually to youtube.com,” he said.”Whatsapp stores files as binary large files so the link is always a complex looking one which was not the case here… It was probably to avoid revealing the actual attributes. With data, it is very difficult to attribute anything on the internet to anyone because anyone can change it. So one has to be really sure,” he added.BJP sources said the document was first shared by a twitter handle called “Team Bharat” and then picked up by Patra.The posts were also shared by the leaders on Facebook but the social media company is yet to flag them.Another BJP functionary said the party is concerned about the way twitter was behaving and that this is not the first time it has acted against the BJP. “At the ministry level, there is already action initiated to look into this,” he added.Guru Prakash Paswan, national spokesperson of the BJP alleged at a time when the entire nation is facing such an unprecedented crisis, the Congress party was busy using the pandemic to defame the government. “There is enough evidence about how congress has tried to make this all about itself instead of working with the centre on Covid-19 management. Even the former MP CM has been caught making wrong statements about death counts.”
Source: Economic Times
