Congress General Secretary Jairam Ramesh on Saturday asked Bharatiya Janata Party leaders to apologise for sharing a doctored video of Rahul Gandhi or face legal action.
In his letter to BJP President JP Nadda, Ramesh said that the saffron party leaders were “deliberately and enthusiastically” sharing a modified report that was aired on Zee News at 9 pm on July 1.
“The original video was Shri. Rahul Gandhi’s comment on the SFI [Students Federation of India] violence on his Wayanad office, but it was deliberately and mischievously doctored to appear as if it was a comment on the heinous murder of Kanhaiya Lal in Udaipur,” Ramesh wrote.
On June 24, Gandhi’s office was vandalised by members of the Students’ Federation of India. The members wanted Gandhi to intervene on behalf of farmers in a Supreme Court verdict about having 1-km boundaries around forest tracts and wildlife sanctuaries. The boundaries could harm the life and livelihood of many inhabitants, especially in the densely-populated Idukki area.
In Udaipur, on June 28, a tailor was killed for supporting suspended Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson Nupur Sharma. She had made disparaging remarks about the Prophet Mohammed in May.
Ramesh on Saturday said that BJP leaders like MP Subrat Pathak and MLA Kamlesh Saini had shared the doctored video of Gandhi. Ramesh also said that Lok Sabha MP Rajyavardhan Rathore propagated the fake video.
“Despite being cautioned by my party colleagues that the clip was maliciously false and misleading, Shri Rathore persisted with amplifying the same, first deleting and then re-uploading the same,” Ramesh wrote.
He added, “This leaves no doubt that his actions were deliberate and part of your party’s strategy to defame the former INC president [Gandhi], to defame the Congress party and to further polarise an already sensitive, communal situation.”
Twitter also flagged a video shared by Rathore as “out of context”, The Hindu reported. In the video, the BJP leader claimed that Gandhi had referred to the Udaipur killers as youngsters.
BJP denies links with Udaipur killer
Separately, the BJP on Saturday denied links to one of the men who murdered a tailor in Udaipur on June 28, NDTV reported. The Congress had alleged that the main accused person was a BJP member.
Sadiq Khan, the chief of BJP’s minority wing in Rajasthan, said that the party had no links to either of the accused persons.
BJP’s IT cell chief Amit Malviya said that Congress was spreading fake news.
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