The Delhi Commission for Women is recently reported to have rebuked Bharatiya Janata Party Rajya Sabha MP Vijay Goel for putting up a poster of a Kashmiri woman in his residence.
On August 8, Goel had tweeted an image of a hoarding that carried a photograph of a woman in traditional Kashmiri garb. The hoarding had the slogan “धारा 370 का जाना तेरा मुस्कराना .” This loosely means “Article 370 gone and you’re all smiles.”
As it turns out, the poster carries an old photograph from a blog post from 2014. A Google reverse-image search led us to rajeshpusalkar.blogspot.com, which is a personal blog maintained by man named Rajesh Pusalkar.
In 2014, he wrote about his trip to Kashmir. The photograph of the woman in the BJP hoarding was picked up from this post. Going by the description of the image, it seems that the woman is not even a Kashmiri but a tourist who dressed up in traditional attire to take photographs.
Since Jammu and Kashmir was stripped of its special status and statehood, Alt News has found several cases of misinformation where old visuals have been used to portray the Kashmiri people in support of the dilution of Article 370.
An old video of a BJP rally was passed off on social media to show Kashmiri children singing in support of the government. An old clip from Bangalore was shared to claim that the Muslim community in Kashmir marched in a procession chanting “Bharat Mata ki Jai”.
This article first appeared on Alt News.
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