Congress leader and member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor recently tweeted an old picture, showing a woman holding an intravenous tube connected to a child's forearm as he defecates, to take a dig at the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan (Self Reliant India Mission) policy.
BOOM found that the photograph shared by Tharoor was clicked in 2017 by Amitesh Kumar, assistant producer with The Lallantop, a news portal.
The term Atmanirbhar first caught social media attention after Prime Minister Narendra Modi used it while announcing the Coronavirus pandemic related economic package on May 12 amid the lockdown to stem the spread of the virus.
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A Hindi caption with the viral tweet translates to 'We are experts in facing any disaster, this is self-reliant India, this is #selfreliant India'.
(Hindi: हर विपदा से लड़ने की, हम में बड़ी महारत है, ये आत्मनिर्भर भारत है, ये #आत्मनिर्भर भारत है!)
The same image has been shared by several Twitter handles.
The same image is viral on Facebook too.
Fact Check
BOOM went through the replies on Tharoor's tweet and found that several users had claimed that the picture was from 2017 and clicked by Amitesh Kumar. Some tweets had also shared the Instagram post by Amitesh from 2019 which had the same image with a Hindi caption.
We looked for Amitesh Kumar's Instagram handle and found that he is an assistant producer with the news portal, The Lallantop. The same picture was shared by him on June 11, 2019.
Amitesh's post had a Hindi caption which translated to 'Since several people have shared the picture, it becomes necessary to mention here that the picture was clicked in 2017 during the Uttar Pradesh Vidhan Sabha elections. The photograph was clicked around 5.24 pm in Mirzapur'.
(Hindi: चूंकि ये फोटो कई लोगों ने डाल दी है। इसलिए ये बताना जरूरी है। ये तस्वीर 2017 की है। उत्तर प्रदेश विधानभा चुनाव के दौरान की। तस्वीर मिर्ज़ापुर की है। तस्वीर 5:24 शाम की है।)
BOOM then contacted Amitesh to get more details on the photograph.
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Amitesh told us that the picture was clicked by him on the outskirts of Mirzapur in UP on March 1, 2017. "The team of Lallantop was covering the UP legislative assembly elections. We were crossing Mirzapur when I saw the women and the child and clicked some shots from my camera. I did not use the pictures for a long time. Later, when I shared it on my Instagram, several people downloaded and shared it without giving credit," Amitesh told BOOM.
The same picture was shared on The Lallantop's Instagram handle latak.lallantop.
Upon BOOM's request, Amitesh sent us the original picture clicked by him. BOOM extracted the metadata of the file with the help of the website metadata2go.com.
According to the metadata of the original picture, it was clicked on 5.23 pm on March 1, 2017.
One Mayank Khurana's name can be seen in the artist's name section in the metadata report. To this, Kumar clarified, that the camera used to click the picture was not his and was provided to him by The Lallantop.
"The camera, a Canon Mark III, was hired by the company. Perhaps the person who used the camera before me was someone named Mayank Khurana. Since I got the camera just a couple of days before we started for the election coverage, I had not made any changes in the settings," Kumar told BOOM.
Amitesh also shared another photo from the same location shot from a different angle. The image can be seen below.
Photo credit: Amitesh and The Lallantop