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15 Mins from Leh to Srinagar, according to Information Minister Smriti Irani

Information and Broadcasting Minister of India made an embarrassing goof-up about the information about the travel time from Srinagar to Leh, and broadcasted it on her verified twitter handle.

What looks like a mistake, and lack of fact-checking in the headline of a Times of India news item, about the Cabinet approval for the Zojila Pass tunnel project, which will reduce the travel time from Srinagar to Leh, has been used by the Union Cabinet Minister of Information & Broadcasting, Smriti Irani.

Irani was quick to jump the gun and tweeted the link, with the mistake still intact.

Although the Times of India seems to have realised the goof-up and has changed the headline, which now reads as “Cabinet approves Zojila Pass tunnel project”, the tweet still shows the wrong information.

The time this news report was done, the tweet was still there, sans any apology about the wrong information being broadcasted by the Information and Broadcasting Minister of India.

Although, some supporters on twitter tried to find a saving grace by pointing out to the ? at the end, the question mark is part of the .cms extension.

The extension is lost when the link is shared on twitter.

This is not the first time a senior member of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) who is part of the cabinet has tweeted fake information.

In, August 2017, while resorting to victim-shaming when a woman chose to report harassment, a Supreme Court advocate tweeted, “So called victim daughter of IAS from Chandigarh with Vikas Barala. This story is as true as like Jasleen Kaur of Delhi & of Rohtak Sisters”, along with a photo of Varnika with two of her friends. Barala was harassed by a blood relation of the member of the BJP.

Shaina NC, Maharashtra BJP’s Treasurer and Spokesperson, lifted and shared the photo the advocate shared, and along with the image, lifted his words too.

She later tweeted that her account was “hacked”. “Just gt access back to my account; some mischievous folks had hacked the account.
Please ignore any activity on my account of past few hours,” she wrote in a tweet.

In another instance, Union Minister Babul Supriyo shared a representational image of how a bus stand in Rajkot was supposed to look, saying that the bus stand has already been inaugurated. As a result, the minister received a lot of ire from the Twitterverse.

 

Eventually, he admitted that he did not cross check the image forwarded to him by a friend and admitted to his mistake.

BJP Spokesperson Sambit Patra in an interview with an English news channel in 2016 shared a photoshopped image with the viewers. In a debate about the central government’s order to install the Indian national flag in central universities, Patra showed an image on his tablet. The image showed Indian soldiers hoisting the national flag.

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