By Pooja Chaudhuri and Pratik Sinha

An alleged document prepared by the All India Congress Committee (AICC) to “corner the Modi government and various BJP governments in the country” through social media and on-ground strategies was extensively shared by top BJP leaders on May 18. The hashtag #CongressToolKitExposed soon began trending.

Here is part 4 of the story -

Morphed document – Analysis of properties

After Congress leaders, including Priyanka Gandhi, termed the COVID-19 toolkit ‘fake’, several BJP workers and supporters shared what they claim is the properties of the toolkit. Patra also shared a screenshot of the LinkedIn profile of the author of the document, Saumya Varma, who works with Rajeev Gowda.

This prompted Gowda to post another tweet clarifying that AICC indeed prepared a document on Central Vista but the COVID-19 toolkit was “forged and made by the BJP”.

He further said that Sambit Patra is showing the metadata/ author of the real document and attributing it to the fake.

Gowda shared the complete AICC 6-page research on Central Vista with Alt News (view PDF). We also looked at the properties and it is identical to the one shared by BJP members.

It is noteworthy that the Central Vista document has six pages, which is what the screenshot shared by Patra also says. But a total of 8 pages have been shared on social media, this includes four pages of the Central Vista research and four pages of the COVID-19 toolkit. It is clear that the two documents are distinct and the digital footprint shared by Patra is of the document Congress has vouched to be authentic. BJP has failed to provide the digital footprint of the COVID-19 toolkit. As one can clearly spot in both screenshots provided above, Patra has shared metadata of the document ‘Central Vista Vanity Project AICC’.

To be continued - No evidence of implementation of social media strategies mentioned on the ‘toolkit’