Thousands of people have shared images from Israel and the US to claim the Narendra Modi government has bolstered India’s border defences.
New Delhi: In a country where cross-border terrorism has been a longstanding problem, the images evoke a feeling of security and ease decades-old fears. But while a couple of them do depict high-security fences meant to keep out infiltrators, three are not from India. In fact, they are from nowhere in the neighbourhood either.
Thousands of social media users have been sharing images of high-security fences from different parts of the world to “congratulate” Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Rajnath Singh for taking decisive action against infiltration.
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One of the images was shared by Facebook user Ajay Motwani on 18 September, with the post notching more than 10,300 shares. A day later, another Facebook user named Manoj Bajaj shared all four images in a public group named ‘We Support Narendra Modi’, getting another 7,000 shares.
The images soon went viral, with a Twitter search revealing that many accounts shared them with an identical caption.
Some users also said they did not mind the rising fuel prices, an issue on which the government has received a lot of criticism, since the Prime Minister was securing the country from threats across the border.
However, the fences depicted are not from India, even though it is true that the government is tapping technology similar to that deployed by Israel to protect its borders.
In 2016, an India Today report said the Indian government had decided to install an underground and underwater sensor system similar to the kinds used in the west Asian nation.
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Image analysis
Picture 1: This image is actually from the Israel-Egypt border, as laid bare by a report published in September 2015 by the Middle East Eye.
Picture 2: These snowy mountains are in the US state of Alaska; the fence forms the perimeter of the King Cove Airport.
Picture 3: This image isn’t a fence at all, but a laser trick from a long-exposure photography project dating back to 2013. The image was clicked using low shutter speed and projecting laser light onto a train track. Read about the project here.
Picture 4: This picture is the only one from the India-Pakistan border, and depicts Indian soldiers. It’s an old photograph used as far back as 2013 in a report by Samaa TV, a Pakistani news portal.
In collaboration with SM Hoaxslayer