For the upcoming assembly elections in Bengal, the Left Front, along with its allies Congress and the newly formed Indian Secular Front, organised a rally at Kolkata’s Brigade Parade Ground on Sunday to show off its strength against the Trinamool Congress and BJP.
Two images of the event were shared on microblogging site Twitter through a verified handle of Saral Patel, national convenor of Congress IT cell. In a now deleted tweet, the images were posted with a claim that a sea of people showed up for the joint rally. The Congress leader said that the images showed the anger of people in West Bengal and added that the images will surely give sleepless nights to rulers in Delhi as well as Kolkata.
Sea of people throngs at the Joint Rally of @INCIndia & @CPIM_WESTBENGAL at Brigade Ground in the Heart of Kolkata!
This shows the anger of people in West Bengal, This will surely give sleepless nights to rulers in Delhi as well as Kolkata. pic.twitter.com/XtAH9y52DW
— Saral Patel (@SaralPatel) February 28, 2021
Later, the images were retweeted and shared by many Congressmen including Vinay Kumar Dokania, who is the national co-coordinator of the Congress IT Cell and Journalist Pankaj Pachauri, media advisor of former PM Manmohan Singh.
However, after the research it turns out that the images that were shared by Congress and its sympathisers were fake. It were not taken on Sunday during their joint rally rather tat a rally of Left parties at the Brigade Parade ground in Kolkata on February 3, 2019. The same image is available in the stock photo gallery of Alamy. According to the caption, the picture was taken on February 3, 2019. Also, a similar picture was published on the website of “People’s Democracy”, the weekly newspaper of CPI(M), on February 10, 2019.
So much for the moral standards of Congress party. Tellingly, the tweet remains undeleted.
