Several states in the country have been experiencing flood situation due to heavy rains. Assam and Bihar, particularly, have been facing fearful odds and governments are trying hard to minimise the loss of life and livelihoods. Under such circumstances, senior leader of the Congress party Priyanka Gandhi made an appeal to the workers and leaders of her party to help those battling the floods on the ground.
There was just one problem with her appeal. Despite her great apparent concern for the people affected by the floods, Priyanka Gandhi recycled old images from past floods and showed them as people suffering in the current spate of floods across the country. As it turns out, the image on the right is from the Assam floods of 2017, as pointed out by Twitter user Ankur Singh.
Similarly, the image on the left is from the Assam floods of 2019. A cropped version of the image appears on the north east news portal NE Now.
This is not the first time Priyanka Gandhi has been caught spreading misinformation through her social media account. Recently, Agra DM had ‘fact-checked’ her claim that 28 people had died of coronavirus within 48 hours. Sharing the details of coronavirus cases and deaths in Agra, the DM had asked the Congress president’s daughter to remove her tweet and apologise.
In March this year, Priyanka, in another such attempt, had posted images from Pakistan to claim that farmers in UP had suffered crop damage. After netizens outraged over her attempts ro spread misinformation, she had deleted her tweet.
