PM Modi accuses Rahul Gandhi of slapping a journalist! Did he lie again?

Did Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his election rally at Dehradun on Friday falsely accuse Congress President Rahul Gandhi of slapping a journalist?

While delivering an election speech at parade ground on Friday, without naming Rahul Gandhi the PM apparently said that he had heard that “Namdaar’ when asked about the alleged corruption in Augusta Westland he slapped journalist and ran away. The Prime Minister further said, “when the ground is slipping under his feet, this apostle of peace has even dared to push away journalists.”

Some of the local newspaper and news agencies reported the statement of the Prime Minister while others ignored the comment, possibly because it was so unlikely.

Enquiries made in Kerala and Maharashtra, where the Congress President had spent most of the time on Thursday and Friday, drew a blank. He had had no interaction with the media and the Mumbai Bureau of the news agency which circulated the PM’s statement had no such information. TV channels in Kerala and Maharashtra, who had cameras following the Congress President, also pleaded their ignorance of any such incident.

The correspondent who filed the copy from Dehradun claimed he had reported what he heard the PM say. While most newspapers in Dehradun and elsewhere seem to have ignored the statement, a few websites carried the ‘news’.

It is unlikely that the Intelligence Bureau would have reported an incident, which never took place, to the Prime Minister. Therefore, the inference is that he would have ‘heard’ it from BJP sources. Or, what is even more probable, he cooked it up.

Now, why would the Prime Minister cook up an improbable ‘story’ like this? Could he have imagined it? Or did he do so deliberately so as to leave a digital imprint of the fake ‘news’?