Senior Congress leader and Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor on Saturday attempted to pull off a cheap trick of taking a dig at Prime Minister Modi by deliberately posting a fake image of Times of India headline.
In a hurry to target the Prime Minister for his informal summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Congress MP Shashi Tharoor shared an image which showed headline of a Times of India article mocking the meet. The headline read, “Modi, Xi will mate 6 times in 24 hours”.
As social media users pointed out that Shashi Tharoor was indulging in spreading fake images, the Congress MP had to delete the misleading image. However, he did not apologise for spreading fake images targetting PM Modi on social media.
This is not the first time that the same image has been doing rounds in the social media. The Congress ecosystem has been time and again have spread this image on social media platforms. Last year, the usual suspects like Vinod Jose, the Executive Editor at the Caravan and disgraced former IPS Officer, Sanjiv Bhatt had shared the same image to discredit PM Modi’s Wuhan visit.
Times of India had also tweeted an explanation in 2018 that the image doing the rounds on social media where the purported Times of India headline read ‘Modi, Xi will mate 6 times in 24 hours’ is fake and malicious.
https://twitter.com/timesofindia/status/989760587021271042?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
“A photoshopped image of our headline on the Modi-Xi meet is doing the rounds. All our editions carry the correct headline. You can see the difference when the correct & fake headlines are placed together. The one on the right is the photoshopped image with the word ‘mate’ tilted”, Times of India had tweeted with the screenshot of the original headline and the photoshopped image.
Read: Congress’ Shashi Tharoor caught lying on cow-related violence in an interview with Swati Chaturvedi
A trend has emerged in the recent years where the usual elements try to undermine Prime Minister Modi’s meets with leaders of powerful nations by concerted attempts at mocking Narendra Modi.
Last year, the Congress party had attempted to undermine Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s historic visit to India by tweeting a juvenile video of the Indian PM hugging world leaders. Congress had also attempted to drag domestic politics into Japanese PM Shinzo Abe’s diplomatic visit to India while claiming credit for the Bullet Train and slamming Narendra Modi for it simultaneously.