The Kolkata Police are not the only ones battling misinformation in the virtual world. Gerry Shih, India bureau chief of The Washington Post, called today “another Wednesday for the Indian social media disinfo factory”.
He was not pointing to anything related to the RG Kar Medical College rape and murder case in which the Calcutta cops have gone after the social media disinfo factory with a gusto missing in recording the statement of the principal.
Shih put up a post on his X (formerly Twitter) handle on Wednesday morning showing how a doctored social media post claiming to be a Washington Post article is doing the rounds.
Shih, who has a rep of being one the smartest foreign correspondents posted in India, did not quote-tweet the post. Instead, he posted a screenshot. Meaning, the person who posted the fake news would not know that he had been outed.
“Why are we not talking about this? After 1 year of investigation, the US found Pannu faked an attack on himself to implicate India,” the post said. It had the purported screenshot of a Washington Post article as evidence.
The purported screenshot had an article headlined: “An assassination plot on the US soil reveals a darker side: Pannun may have staged an attack on himself to implicate India.”
Shih shared this screenshot and wrote, “The viral post below is photoshopped, NOT a @washingtonpost story. Unfortunately, it already has 3.2K retweets—another Wednesday for the Indian social media disinfo factory.”
Shih shared the original WaPo article on his handle. This article, published on April 29, 2024 has the headline- “An assassination plot on American soil reveals a darker side of Modi’s India.”
The doctored was from an X user called Arun Pudur, whose bio says: “Dharmā । Kuṭumba । Rāṣṭra । Technology l Investments I Politics l”. His bio also says he is an entrepreneur.
The real Washington Post article talks of India’s alleged links to the assassinations of overseas leaders of the Khalistani separatist movement.
Six prominent pro-Khalistan activists abroad have been killed in the past two years: Ripudaman Singh, Harvinder Singh Sandhu, Paramjit Singh Panjwar, Avtar Singh Khanda, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, and Sukhdool Singh.
All six were killed in foreign lands under mysterious circumstances. Three were killed in Canada, two in Pakistan, and one in the United Kingdom. As per The Washington Post, 11 Sikh or Kashmiri separatists identified by the Narendra Modi government and living in Pakistan were killed in the past two years.
According to reports, all these people were in India’s most-wanted list and belonged to proscribed terror groups like the Khalistan Commando Force, Khalistan Tiger Force or Babbar Khalsa.
India’s diplomatic relations with Canada reached an all-time low last year when prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, accused India of killing three men on Canadian soil. Canada arrested three men for these killings.
The Washington Post claimed US authorities know India had plans to assassinate Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Sikh separatist with US citizenship, “but officials emphasized that no smoking gun proof has emerged”.
Last September, The Washington Post had done an investigative piece headlined “Inside the vast digital campaign by Hindu nationalists to inflame India”. It accused India’s ruling party of having “perfected the spread of inflammatory, often false and bigoted material on an industrial scale, earning both envy and condemnation beyond India’s borders”.
