27 April,2024 07:25 AM IST | Mumbai | A Correspondent
Piyush Goyal, the BJP candidate for Mumbai North
There is dismay and anger among BJP workers in Mumbai North about fake news circulating in certain sections of the media that Piyush Goyal, the party's candidate for the constituency, visited a fish market with a cloth on his nose. They are angry at what they say are attempts by the Opposition to spread a malicious defamatory campaign against Goyal about an incident, which, ironically, never even happened.
The party believes that this concocted piece has been planted and is being spread with a vicious agenda of maligning the motives and intent of Goyal. Incidentally, the news report neither mentions the date of his alleged visit nor its time. Insiders say that Goyal's campaign agenda is marked on a minute-to-minute basis and every movement is mapped according to a plan, photographed and recorded. They are 100 per cent sure that the report is fake and planted by vested interests
While the issue of deepfakes of actors Aamir Khan and Ranveer Singh has barely died down, this malicious fake news, they say, is clearly intended to sow seeds of ill feeling in the minds of sections of voters against the BJP candidate.
Those in the know of local politics think that at a time when the party and the candidate have been making rounds of fishing villages and interacting with the local community to share information about scores of schemes being launched for the benefit of fishing communities and the fisheries sector, this kind of fake news is an attempt to create some kind of misunderstanding among the local population. They say the ânews' is concocted, fictitious and blatantly insulting to the being of Goyal.
