Integrity Score 2185
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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 6 of the investigation by Alt News -
To gauge its authenticity, Alt News checked if Congress members and volunteers were using these phrases in an organised manner or whether multiple individuals were using the terminologies. We found this wasn’t the case, and most of the limited usage was by people not associated with Congress.
Rajeev Gowda informed us that the Central Vista research was circulated internally on May 7. The COVID-19 toolkit also says ‘May 2021’ on the top left corner of each page. But in the almost three weeks of this month, none of the ‘strategies’ have been applied.
If ‘super spreader kumbh’ is searched on Twitter, all the recent posts are made by pro-BJP or BJP handles in reference to the Congress toolkit. So we truncated our search till May 17, before the alleged document surfaced. The number of tweets posted with that phrase, having at least one retweet, is countable – 15. Readers can check for themselves here. (https://twitter.com/Bashirbagdadi/status/1390323569863716864?s=19)
None of these seem to have been posted by Congress workers.
At another point, the toolkit asks Congress workers to use the phrase ‘Indian strain’ whenever talking about the new mutant coronavirus. It also says that social media volunteers may call it ‘Modi strain’. The term ‘Indian strain’ has mostly been used by the media, both international and domestic. Between May 1 to May 17, there are five handles with at least one retweet that have used the term ‘Modi strain’. Five tweets don’t make a campaign. Social media propaganda demands hundreds of tweets of the same narrative being put out.
BJP members widely shared a tweet by London-based author Sonia Faleiro to support their claim. However, neither has Faleiro used the word ‘strain’ (her tweet says ‘variant’) nor is she associated with Congress.
To be continued..