Mamata Banerjee Didn’t Criticise ISRO, It’s Fawad Chaudhry’s Tweet

This claim is actually false and Mamata never made any comment like this.

The Quint
WebQoof
Published:
The message says that West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee criticised ISRO harshly after they lost communication with Chandrayaan-2’s Vikram lander.
i
The message says that West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee criticised ISRO harshly after they lost communication with Chandrayaan-2’s Vikram lander.
(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

advertisement

Don’t fall for fake news, click here to check out The Quint’s WebQoof stories.   

CLAIM

A message is being shared on social media with the claims that West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee criticised ISRO harshly, after they lost communication with Chandrayaan-2’s Vikram lander ahead of its attempt to make the scheduled soft landing on the surface of the Moon. The message, in Bengali is: “যে কাজটা পারবেন না সেটা করতে যাবার দরকার নেই ইসরো কে বললেন মমতা” (There is no need for you to try and undertake what you cannot accomplish, said Mamata to ISRO)

The message was shared widely on Facebook.

The message was being shared widely on Facebook.(Photo: Screenshot/Facebook)

Twitter wasn’t far behind either.

On Twitter, people were sharing the message with the link to a website, where an article in Bengali which claimed that Mamata had made this comment on Twitter and questioned how she could do so as an Indian. Interestingly, the website appeared to be a blog run by India Today.

A screenshot of the blog carrying the claim.(Photo: Screenshot)

WHAT IS THE TRUTH?

This claim is actually false and Mamata never made any such comment. However, a tweet was made along similar lines by Pakistan minister Fawad Chaudhry after the Vikram lander went incommunicado. This has been manipulated and attributed to Mamata.

WHAT WE FOUND

Firstly, we noticed that even though the website claimed to be part of India Today, it carried a URL which is indiatodaydailynews.blogspot.com/2019/09/blog-post_62.html . India Today’s existing news website however is: https://www.indiatoday.in/.

Blogspot moreover, is a platform to publish a free blog under a sub domain “example.blogspot.com”. Therefore, anyone can ideally create a blog with the URL much like the blog in question.

Additionally, on scrolling to the end of the the India Today website, we saw that they also had a list of their publications and channels, which did not include the blog mentioned.

(Photo: Screenshot/India Today)

This showed that despite the blog using the India Today logo at the top, it is not part of the India Today group.

Secondly, on reading through the blog, we noticed that though it mentioned the exact statement Mamata had allegedly made, they had not attributed it to any source anywhere.

Despite searching for news reports about Mamata criticising ISRO’s alleged failure, we came across none. Even a search through her Twitter profile for any such tweets yielded no results. Instead, we came across tweets where Mamata had congratulated ISRO, saying that India was proud of its scientists.

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

The Quint found that the comment in question attributed to Mamata is actually a version of what Pakistan’s Science and Technology Minister Fawad Chaudhry had tweeted after the Vikram lander went incommunicado. The tweet had gone viral at the time and grabbed a lot of attention for the criticism he was directing towards India. In his tweet, he had said “ Jo kaam ata nai panga nai leitay na”, which roughly translates to “If you don’t know how to do something then don’t try to act smart”.

Therefore, Chaudhry’s comment has clearly been falsely attributed to Mamata Banerjee.

(Not convinced of a post or information you came across online and want it verified? Send us the details on Whatsapp at 9643651818, or e-mail it to us at webqoof@thequint.com and we'll fact-check it for you. You can also read all our fact-checked stories here.)

(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)

Published: undefined

ADVERTISEMENT
SCROLL FOR NEXT