BJP IT cell chief blasted for attempts to malign NDTV’s Ravish Kumar

A botched attempt to cast aspersions on NDTV journalist Ravish Kumar is costing BJP's IT department head Amit Malviya dearly. After many alert twitter users promptly exposed him for tweeting out an edited clip of Ravish’s speech, Amit and his party soon became a target of public ridicule for spreading lies and rumours on social media.

This video posted by the BJP IT cell chief is in fact an 11-second clip cut out from a 10-minute speech that Ravish Kumar delivered at Press Club of India, according to an Altnews report. The clip gives a false impression that Ravish has been speaking on behalf of a political party and Amit posted the same on twitter with a question: “Does a journalist have a party?”

But if one listens to the complete speech, Ravish made this statement, “Cheen aur burma se jab woh laute to pehla kaam yehi kare ki woh dadhichi ko unfollow kare aur woh bataye ki unse kahe ki hamse galti hui hai. Jab tak yeh vyakti mafi nahin mangega aur mein party ke logo se kehta hoon ki yeh nationalist hindutva, nationalist nahin hai, yeh hum sab ko ek nagrik ki taur par pradhan mantri se maang karni chahiye.’”

“In the aforesaid statement, ‘woh’ refers to PM Modi and Ravish Kumar is urging PM Modi to speak to his own party workers and tell them that people like Dadhich are not true nationalists,” the Altnews report stated.

“Had Amit Malviya bothered to hear the full speech, Ravish had equally criticized Karnataka’s Congress Government and Maharashtra’s BJP Government for failing to find the killers of Kalburgi, Pansare and Dabholkar,” the report said, adding that Altnews had also recently written about how Amit Malviya had falsely claimed that Rahul Gandhi had visited Gurmeet Ram Rahim’s Dera Sacha Sauda.

That the BJP National IT Cell Head has to circulate misleading videos to target a journalist who is critical of the ruling establishment is shocking, it said.

Ravish in a Facebook post wrote: “Has the world’s biggest political party set it’s IT Cell chief onto me? I’ve full faith in the decency of BJP workers—who won’t get instigated by the rumours spread by Amit Malviya. Those who will keep silent, will berate whatever legacy RSS and BJP has.”