After a number of exits polls from different survey organizations predicted an embarrassing defeat for the anti-Modi camp, the trend of crying foul over the EVMs has started picking up. Leading the efforts are fake news portals which have emerged evidently to synergize with the Communist-Congress media nexus and help political losers to save their face by spreading misleading information.
This time the targets are the EVMs; with Congress and other parties of the anti-Modi camp poised to repeat their ghastly and embarrassing performance from the 2014 general elections, EVMs are surely the soft targets to shift the blame. A similar trend of misleading claims against the EVMs had emerged in several state elections where Congress had faced a crushing defeat following the 2014 general elections.
https://twitter.com/anujg/status/1130675395823407104
This video specifically claims the BJP is targeting a few states to manipulate the electoral process. It mentions states like West Bengal and Odisha where according to various opinion polls and more recently various exit polls, BJP is poised to make huge inroads in the opposition’s political ground. This partly explains the intent behind spreading misleading information related to these states.
It is to note that outrage over EVMs on these fake news portals and their political overlords only emerge when Congress or any other anti-Modi party is expected to bite the dust in an election. In Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh where Congress had formed the government recently towards the end of 2018, no such uproar over EVMs was noticed. This selective uproar over the EVMs on the basis of expected elections results is sufficient to indicate of the malice behind these allegations.
The online space over recent years has been seeing a huge influx of ambiguous and confusing news text and video content. Some reports though highly delusional, succeed to have an impact on the minds of those exposed to it. However, increased reach of information due to digitization has prevented effective control and check over these agenda driven attempts.
Earlier, The Indian Express had tried to reach the Tricolour News Network through a number mentioned on their Facebook page, and the findings are sure to raise further doubts about the authenticity of the video. The Indian Express reported, “The Indian Express called the number mentioned on Tricolour’s Facebook page, a “Catherine” responded: “We had sent a team from Canada to carry out the (demonetization) sting operations between January and April 2017.” Asked who had carried out the sting, Catherine replied: “I feel you are acting as your Prime Minister’s intelligence agency operative.”
“The company’s address, as mentioned in publicly available records, is that of an agency, Companies Made Simple Group, which “offers business products and services to start up companies and small businesses.” Public records show that Tricolour News Network was incorporated as a company in London on November 28, 2018; the domain name (tnn.world) was registered on January 31, 2019.
Kapil Sibal had also earlier used a different unverified video from the Tricolour News Network to level accusations against the BJP. However, on being asked about the verifiability of the video, Kapil Sibal brushed off any responsibility for authenticating the video and claimed he had just downloaded the video from the website and in turn asked the questioning reporters to authenticate. “How can I verify? I am not the owner of this video. It is in the website,” Sibal had said.