Once again, an older and fabricated news clip targeting Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has resurfaced, only to be debunked.
Purporting to be from The Telegraph dated Monday, June 8, 1987, the clip falsely accuses Kejriwal, then a student at IIT Kharagpur, of rape. When a friend recently sent me this resurrected clip, my immediate reaction was to dismiss it without giving it much thought. Its timing and the evident hand of the dirty tactics department were glaringly obvious.
However, some still accepted it as genuine. I conducted basic checks and found conclusive evidence of forgery. But before delving into that, let’s examine how other sources discredited the clip. The Quint dismissed it as fake back in 2018, citing discrepancies and the use of a tool to generate newspaper clips. They demonstrated that while the tool could display the supplied matter in the first two columns accurately, the glimpses of the matter in the third remained unchanged. The Quint even produced another story using the tool that showed similar words in the third column. Another tell-tale sign was the spacing between paragraphs, inconsistent with The Telegraph’s stylesheet.
Boom also proved its falsity, referencing Kejriwal’s affidavit to the Election Commission of India, which made no mention of such a crime. Additionally, inquiries with Delhi police yielded no substantiating information, but they declined to comment.
Surprisingly, a glaring oversight in verifying the clip was the newspaper’s logo. The Telegraph, based in Kolkata, features a simple, non-decorative font for its logo, unlike the decorative one used in the fake clip, resembling that of The Telegraph in the UK. The shabbily written story – with lousy English – did not match the style of newspaper report writing either. Moreover, the inclusion of the Times of India in the story further raised doubts. The story said: “‘We are shocked and we can’t believe, but we will cooperate with the police’ hostel warden said when Times of India got in touch with the authorities.’’
Why would a report purportedly from The Telegraph, datelined in Kharagpur, quote the Times of India? The story also went on to mention that the alleged rape victim produced the identity card of Kejriwal and that is how police reached the IIT campus. It’s evident the fabricator paid little heed to coherence, focusing solely on tarnishing Kejriwal’s image.
The absence of a date in the dateline and the story’s abrupt start from the dateline space cast reasonable doubt on its authenticity. It’s lamentable that such fabrications are repeatedly circulated to serve the agenda of a purportedly ‘opposition-free Bharat.’ While the prime minister expresses concerns over deep fakes, instances like these exemplify shallow fakes benefiting the current regime’s narrative.
Urvish Kothari is a writer and satirist based in Gujarat.
