Tamil Nadu Congress leader J. Aslam Basha puts out tweet with misleading caption, which received more than 2,700 likes.
New Delhi: Tamil Nadu Congress Committee’s Minority department chairman J. Aslam Basha Thursday tweeted an image of a woman pulling a hand-pulled rickshaw with a misleading caption.
IAS topper, introducing her father to people. Grand salute to her and her father..
PC: Sanjay Singh pic.twitter.com/XRRfTrw1Qj
— Dr. J Aslam Basha (@JAslamBasha) October 4, 2018
Basha’s tweet claimed the girl pulling the rickshaw was an IAS topper who was introducing her rickshaw-puller father to the world. Basha attributed the image to a person named Sanjay Singh. The tweet was liked by more than 2,700 users and retweeted by more than 800 accounts.
This rags-to-riches story, however, is far from the truth.
The woman in the picture is Shramona Poddar, a 25-year-old Instagrammer-cum-traveller. The said image of her was posted on 24 April by outdoor adventure products company Wildcraft India as part of a marketing campaign.
Poddar reposted the image on her Instagram page. In her post, Poddar said she asked the rickshaw-puller to sit back as she wanted to pull the rickshaw in Shobhabazar, Kolkata. She even referred to the man as ‘rickshaw uncle’.
It’s not the first instance that this image with the same misleading caption has gone viral on social media.
On Wednesday, an unverified Facebook page called Silchar Diary posted the image with the same caption that Basha posted.
The image was shared by over 24,600 Facebook users and received over 5,000 reactions as well.
In collaboration with SM Hoaxslayer.