Congress Shares Photos From Taiwan Tea Garden As Assam

The official Assam Bachao Facebook page created by the Indian National Congress for the upcoming elections in the State shared two photos of tea plantations in Taiwan falsely claiming they are from Assam. The now deleted posts were also run as Facebook ads by the page between February 26 to March 1.

Assam goes to polls in three phases starting March 27 till April 1 to elect representatives for its 126 assembly constituencies.

The posts were captioned as 'Team Garden estate workers Assam'; the second image was captioned as 'Let's make Assam a symbol of Progress. Team Garden estate workers.'

Archives of the posts in Facebook's ad library can be seen here and here.

Senior Assam minister and key BJP strategist of the North East, Himanta Biswa Sarma also pointed out in a tweet that the Assam Bachao page has used images from Taiwan for a sponsored post on Facebook.

Assam Bachao, a verified Facebook page, states in its bio, "Let's revive what's been stripped off the state by the BJP. It is time to save Assam." Created on February, 2021, the page has spent more than 7 lakhs in ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.

Fact Check

BOOM ran a reverse image search on the both the photographs used in the sponsored posts and found that they belong to Taiwan tea gardens.

Image 1

The first image which shows a picturesque terraced farm is originally from Bagua Tea Garden in Taiwan.

The reverse image search led us to links from travel blogs featuring the same image. The image can be found in several international stock photo websites and has been captioned as 'Bagua tea garden.' Several other images from the same artist can be seen here.

Image 2

The second image which shows women tea plantation workers on duty was found on Getty images. According the caption, the image is a stock photo from Bihu tea garden.

The image can also be found in other stock photo websites, Stockunlimited and Fotosearch. The Bihu tea garden is located in the Meishan Township of Chiayi County, Taiwan.