Fact checkers, netizens, Chinese media call out BJP leaders for posting Beijing airport images as Jewar in UP

After the Prime Minister laid the foundation stone of the airport in Jewar in Uttar Pradesh, several Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders and social media users shared a photograph of the airport claiming how it would look once it would be completed.

However, the image that BJP leaders shared was, in fact of the Beijing Daxing International Airport, China, which was designed by Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid. The video, bearing a watermark of the government’s citizen engagement platform MyGov, was also tweeted from its official handle, ‘MyGovHindi’. However, it was deleted on Friday morning after fact checkers pointed out the obvious error.

Union ministers Anurag Thakur, Prahlad Singh Patel, Annapurna Devi, Arjun Ram Meghwal, Uttar Pradesh BJP chief Swatantra Dev Singh and UP deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya were among those who had tweeted the image of the Beijing Daxing International Airport.

Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of fact-checking website AltNews, pointed out that the distinct starfish design was that of the Daxing International Airport in the Chinese capital. The video shared by him was originally tweeted by BloombergQuint, after the airport in Beijing was inaugurated in 2019.

This image was also carried by The Guardian in an article on China in 2019. The image of the airport was also shared on a London-based architecture magazine, Da Zeen, published in 2015. The caption read, "Zaha Hadid unveils designs for "world's largest airport passenger terminal" in Beijing."

The Noida airport, spread over more than 1,300 hectares, will be Asia’s biggest, Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia had said on Wednesday, according to ANI. It will have a capacity to serve around 1.2 crore passengers in a year.

Several BJP leaders and ministers have been called out by China’s state-run Global Television Network (CGTN) for passing off images of the Beijing Daxing International Airport as the model for the upcoming Jewar airport in Noida.

CGTN employee Shen Shiwei on Friday tweeted a collage of senior BJP leaders and Union ministers’ tweets about the Noida International Airport. “Errr….Shocked to know that Indian government officials had to use photographs of China Beijing Daxing International Airport as proof of their ‘achievements of infrastructure’,” tweeted Shiwei.

This is for the second time that the goof up has been called out by various fact checkers, leaders and media platforms. Earlier an advertisement by the Yogi government boasting of 'development' had used purported image of a Kolkata flyover. Consequently, several social media users and political leaders had slammed the Uttar Pradesh government for this blunder.