Prime Minister Narendra Modi picks up a child, who leans towards two microphones in front of her and appears to utter a derogatory phrase often used by the BJP to mock Congress president Rahul Gandhi. That’s all there is in the 23-second video clip. But wait. There is another clip. The same clip, in fact. Only this time the child ridicules Modi himself, as she repeats what appears to be a Twitter campaign launched by the Congress. It later emerges that the original clip, dating back to 2016, was of a differently-abled child, Gauri Shardul, reciting a shloka from the Ramayana during one of Modi’s visits to his home state, Gujarat.
The two versions of the video clip, both doctored and widely circulated through social media and WhatsApp in India, is a classic case study of “fake news”, that new global menace described by Collins dictionary last year as a “very real word”. Over the past few years, fake news has moved beyond its conventional description of “false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting”. It’s now mostly a political tool, used to nail rival parties with doctored audios and videos and morphed photographs.
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