LUCKNOW: ‘Ghaziabad Shocker: Two men dig out body of woman from grave to gangrape her’, screamed the headline on one website.
‘VIDEO: Two Men Dig Out Body Of Woman Of Ghaziabad From Grave To Gangrape Her,’ screamed another website.
Shared around on WhatsApp and other social media, the ‘stories’ provided grist for the rumour mill operated by Internet trolls, who are already worked up to a lather on communal issues in Uttar Pradesh.
The stories were published by two websites, indiasamvad.co.in and viralinindia.net. On examining the details, however, and conducting a quick Google check, it emerged that the posts were of an alleged incident that was originally reported by the DNA Hindi news website (dnahindi.com) on October 24, 2015. What’s more, indiasamvad.com had published the exact same report with the same “pictures used for representation” on its website on June 8, 2016. And it was back again on the site on Monday, published afresh, alluding to an ‘incident’ that happened ‘two days ago’.
Monday’s reports on indiasamvad.com and viralinindia.com say the body of a Muslim woman, who had died of complications from pregnancy, was dug up “two days ago” in the village of Talheta in Ghaziabad district of Uttar Pradesh and ‘gang-raped’. This alleged act of necrophilia was committed by at least two people, according to the reports, and the body was left naked in a field nearby. The details are the same as mentioned in the DNA report from a year and a half ago.
For good measure, viralinindia.net also posted a video to go with its report. The link to a YouTube video by the ABP Live TV news channel has the anchor expressing outrage at the ‘incident’ in a modulated melodramatic voice to the accompaniment of eerie music. The YouTube-hosted video plays on the viralindia.net site but if you went to the ABP Live video on YouTube itself, you find that it was hosted on October 23, 2015, a day prior to the publication of the incident on DNA Hindi.
Comments under the indiasamvad.co.in report on Monday show that readers bought the impression that gang-rape of a Muslim woman’s body dug up from a grave took place just two days ago, as the report claims.
The recycling of a two-year-old report comes just after Uttar Pradesh was witness to a controversy over remarks supposedly made by an associate of Yogi Adityanath at a public meeting in Gorakhpur, organised by his Hindu Yuva Vahini, in 2014. Remarks by the associate, having a very close parallel to the report in the two websites on Monday, were the subject of much acrimony in the recent UP elections, which led to Yogi Adityanath becoming the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.
