The Hindu right-wing ecosystem – purportedly to help the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Assam to influence the majority of Assamese voters on communal lines in the coming assembly polls – has been circulating on social media a morphed video of Maulana Badruddin Ajmal, the chief of the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), to claim that he was prodding the Muslims of Assam to vote for him because he would then set up “an Islamic nation” with the help of the Congress and not leave “a single Hindu” without converting them to Islam.
The original speech of Ajmal – uploaded in 2019 on YouTube from a public speech – spoke exactly the opposite of what the right-wing Twitter handles had tried to establish in poll-bound Assam since the evening of March 9.
The fake video was thereafter not only circulated by the right-wing ecosystem from across the country on Twitter but was also run on March 10 without any verification by the Assamese news channels, including NewsLive, owned by the wife of BJP leader Himanta Biswa Sarma.
The Assamese news channel Dy365 later deleted the story from its site without an apology to its readers and ran both the original and the doctored versions on its channel.
Interestingly, the fake news was tweeted on March 10 morning by Deepak Chaurasia too, consulting editor of NewsNation TV. His tweet was thereafter quoted nearly 350 times by the right-wing trolls to circulate the fake news. It was liked over 13,000 times and retweeted over 3,000 times, before he deleted it in the evening.