On June 3rd, 2022, Law minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad interacted with media persons and says that “The PM told the leaders that he wouldn’t leave his children in the warzone. Following his conversion, the war stopped for 3 hours to give safe passage to Indian students.” He claimed that Russia and Ukraine stopped the war for a few hours at PM Modi’s request.
On November 14, 2022, Home minister Amit shah tweeted that “on the request of Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, Russia and Ukraine stopped the war for 72 hours and let Indians go” with a clip of his interview for News18 Uttarpradesh in which he was saying the same thing.
On 20th February 2023, BJP President JP Nadda said in his public assembly that “no other prime minister in the history of India has been great as Narendra Modi ji. He stopped the Russia-Ukraine war to evacuate 22,500 students from there back to India.”
Before all of these 3 statements, on 3rd March 2022, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) already denied these claims, after a few news channels and some Twitter handles claimed that Russia and Ukraine stopped the war for a few hours at PM Modi’s request. MEA’s spoke person Arindam Bagch said in a press conference on March 3, 2022, “extrapolating that to say somebody is holding off bombing or this is something we were coordinating is absolutely inaccurate.”
PM Modi stopping the Russia-Ukraine war was fake news and many news channels reported on it, many BJP leaders are using this to get votes and are still using it and it has been more than 1 year since MEA denied this claim and calls this information inaccurate. This is just one case of fake news. Fake news is being spread every day around us. And the sad part is some media houses are playing an important role in its widespread.
Some companies are there just to fact-check if the news is true or false. And the fact check they do, some fake news is due to lack of responsibility by media houses, many of them are shared by some individuals and got reshared by too many. No one care to verify if the news is real or not. And many people are intentionally spreading fake news. In this storm of fake news, it gets very hard to differentiate between what’s true and what’s not.
A few days ago, the chief justice of India. DY Chandrachud gives a speech at a conference organized by the American Bar Association, where he said that “truth has become a victim in an age of false news.” With the increasing cases of fake news, it’s getting very hard to differentiate between what’s real and what’s not, and in the era of social media, information can spread in a blink of an eye. It gets very important to keep our eyes open and not believe anything blindly. Otherwise, it will cover us from all sides and we will only be able to see what they want us to see.