New Delhi: As India celebrates the festivals of Durga Puja and Navratri, a cropped screenshot of a 2016 article by The Wire is being misrepresented and doing the rounds on social media, falsely claiming the news website referred to the festival as “racist” and called the Hindu goddess a “sex worker”.
First #Tanishq then #EROS_NOW and now #TheWire Hope some day they also get some guts to write something about the 6 year old girl Aisha.. It's easy to target Hinduism as you know that you'll not be beheaded after writing this. #TheWire #DurgaPuja #sicularism #sickularism pic.twitter.com/LKaLm8zl6z
— James vinchi 🇮🇳 (@JamesVinchi) October 23, 2020
The text in the viral screenshot reads: “Durga Puja is the most controversial racial festival, where a fair skinned beautiful goddess Durga is depicted brutally killing a dark-skinned native called Mahishasura. Mahishasura, a brave self-respecting leader, was tricked into marriage by the Aryans. They hired a sex worker called Durga, who enticed Mahishasura into marriage and killed him after nine nights of honeymooning, during sleep.”
The screenshot is taken from The Wire’s news article Mahishasura and the Minister dated February 27, 2016, quoting Union minister Smriti Irani who read the aforementioned lines about Durga Puja in her Lok Sabha speech. According to the article, Irani was reading the description of Durga Puja from a pamphlet allegedly distributed by the organisers of the event when students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) celebrated ‘Mahishasur Martyrdom Day.’
Fact-checking website Boomlive reported this story earlier on Monday and quoted founding editor of The Wire Siddharth Varadarajan who explained on Twitter that the screenshot is a “quote of Smriti Irani, as HRD min in Feb 2016, reading out in parliament extracts from what she said was a JNU pamphlet.”
What‘s being circulated by Hindutva loonies on Twitter as The Wire’s ‘view’ is actually a quote of Smriti Irani, as HRD min in Feb 2016, reading out in parliament extracts from what she said was a JNU pamphlet. The full story we ran is here: https://t.co/Rqf0qWljIo
— Siddharth (@svaradarajan) October 26, 2020
The same speech is available on the official YouTube channel of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
This article was originally published on Boom Live.