On April 17, the official BJP Twitter handle posted a 52-second clip and said: “A heart-wrenching video of a wailing aged man who has not gotten any food for the last 2 days. This is @nusratchirps’s constituency where TMC is busy siphoning off ration while the poor suffer.”
Nusratchirps is the Twitter handle of Basirhat MP Nusrat Jahan who won the Lok Sabha election on a Trinamul ticket.
As the BJP handle said, the clip shows an elderly man choke up as he stands in the middle of a crowd, says they had not eaten for two days, appeals to the chief minister whom he addresses as “Ma”, describes himself as her child and declares it is better they be shot if her government cannot feed him.
Then, placing both hands on his head, he falls to his knees.
On Saturday evening, the official Twitter handle of West Bengal police posted a video showing the same man.
The aged man is heard saying: “I am a jatra actor. Some youths told me to show them how I would enact a starving man during the lockdown. Some youths posted it on the Internet without my knowledge. I have no complaint against the government. I get my rations from the government.”
The police said they had found that the man, who had identified himself in the first video as Mobarek Mondal, had a digital ration card that had an entry showing rations had been collected on April 2 this year.
Mondal has been arrested on several charges, including making a false statement in a public place, that carry a maximum imprisonment of two years.
The first clip was shot on a mobile phone at Matia in Basirhat, around 55km from Calcutta, the police said.
Basirhat police said they had received a complaint from a resident of Matia who alleged the statement made by the man in the video was false.
“We have arrested Mobarek Mondal. He is an actor. He said he got influenced by some local youths who asked him to act as though he was starving during the lockdown. He said he did not understand the gravity of his statement and the implications,” an officer attached to the Basirhat police district said.
Asked, BJP national secretary Rahul Sinha told this newspaper that he did not believe the video posted by the police was authentic.
“The second video appears fake to me. The police engaged in partisan politics for the TMC. I’m sure the police have forced this poor person to claim he is an actor even when the truth is that he wasn’t getting food for two days. A government that can fudge death figures can manipulate any poor individual,” Sinha alleged.
The police stood by their account, saying that records suggested Mondal’s family had been drawing rations regularly. The police added that they were looking for the youths who had allegedly asked the man to act out the scene.
