Yesterday a news report was published in multiple media houses which caused a lot of unrest. It claimed that AIMIM MLA Akbaruddin Owaisi had said that AIMIM and Modi/BJP together would wipe out Congress in India. This news that 2 parties from opposing ends of the political spectrum could combine, was met with shock and also anger from supporters.
See how news sites like CNN IBN, Aaj Tak and DNA covered this story:
Is it possible that Akbaruddin Owaisi was hinting at an alliance with BJP? Is there some tacit understanding between them? Congress quickly jumped into action saying this had exposed BJP.
But something weird happened late last night. Zee News, which had also reported this, changed its headline. From the below screenshot one can see, in Google’s cache, there is the old headline, but when you click on that, you reach a page with a totally different headline
So what happened? What special information did Zee News get? As you can see from all the above reports, they refer to a video in which Owaisi was seen and heard making the statement. The video is available online and once one sees it, the spin and blatant misrepresentation of facts by the media is obvious. We have put up the relevant portion of the video here:
In the video, Owaisi can be seen attacking Modi, BJP and Congress throughout. The key sentence which has been grossly misquoted by the media is when he says “Along with BJP, I will carry the corpse of Congress too”. This has been reported by media as “With BJP, I will carry the corpse of Congress”.
To anyone seeing the full video it is clear that a man constantly attacking BJP and Modi and Congress cannot say in the same breath that he will combine with BJP to finish the Congress. But for some reason, media picked up this absurd meaning by seeing a small portion and twisting it beyond recognition.