BJP uses a photo of Saroo Brierley’s family as beneficiaries in a poster about EWS homes.
Claim
Thousands of poor living in slums in Delhi’s landless camp are getting the gift of a pucca house. Today the Prime Minister Shri @narendramodi will give the key of 3024 EWS flats to the beneficiaries, their dream will come true.
Rating
Explanation
Prime Minister Narendra Modi handed over 3,024 multistorey flats to the slum dwellers which were constructed under the Delhi Development Authority’s “in situ slum rehabilitation” project. For the event, a poster was shared by Amit Shah in his twitter handle, as well BJP Delhi’s twitter handle.
Archive Link to Amit Shah’s tweet
The poster contained a family posing for a photograph, who was supposedly one of the beneficiaries of the project. However, journalist Pradeep Pandey contested that the photo was already shared by a twitter account in 2019 and alleged that this is not the actual photo of the beneficiaries.
बीजेपी ने पक्का मकान तो दे दिया लेकिन असली फोटो नहीं ले पाए।
यही फोटो शेरु मुंशी खान ने 2019 में ट्वीट की थी जो सेरू ब्रीर्ल्ये के नाम से भी जाने जाते हैं। इस फोटो को उनके ट्विटर हैंडल पर देखा जा सकता है। pic.twitter.com/byHfNwfJzz— Pradeep Pandey (@voiceofpradeep) November 2, 2022
What’s the truth?
When we did a key word search along with reverse searched the image, we found an article from Mint which was published in 2013 containing the image with a caption “Saroo Brierley with his Indian family. Photo courtesy: Penguin Books india”. It is a book review on two books, “Indian. English. A memoir” and “A Long way Home.”
The book mentioned in the 2013 Mint article is written by Saroo Brierly and it is about how he accidentally got separated and went to Kolkata from his hometown Khandwa in Madhya Pradesh to Kolkata where he was adopted by Australian parents John and Sue Brierly and moved to Australia in 1987. After two decades of growing up in Australia, Saroo Brierley found his home through Google Earth and visited his biological family. This photo was taken on that occasion.
Using this photo, a poster is now designed and shared by the BJP Delhi and its leader Amit Shah with a message that 3,024 concrete houses will be given to slum dwellers by Prime Minister Modi which misleads that it is a photo of one of the beneficiaries, when in fact it is not.
Saroo Brierley had written a book based on his life story title “A Long way home” and it was adapted to a film “Lion” in 2016. The movie was nominated for Academy Awards (Oscars) in 6 categories.
Interestingly, BJP used a picture of a famous Tamil Writer Perumal Murugan in poster for an election rally which also took place in Delhi in 2021.
Read More: Photo of a Tamil writer in BJP Yatra advertisements in Delhi !
Conclusion
The picture used in the BJP poster as one of the beneficiaries of the newly launched scheme is misleading as it was taken when Saroo Brierly reunited with his family in Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh.
