Congress President Rahul Gandhi has tweeted a clip from ABP News where Punya Prasun Bajpai is talking of a female farmer Chandramani Kaushik who interacted with Prime Minister Modi last month through the NaMo app.

PM ?? ???? ?? ?? ??? ?????? ??? ?? ?? ??? ????? ??? ?? ?? ????? ??? ??? ?? ?? ?? ????? ???? ?? ?? ?? ??? ????? ?? ????? ??? ? pic.twitter.com/dEqvklqtRR

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) July 9, 2018

In the video, Bajpai tried to show how Kaushik had been forced and tutored by officials who had come visiting from Delhi to stage a false story about her income. He claims that their correspondent got in touch with the farmer. The correspondent asks her if her income has doubled from the farming of rice, to which Kaushik says, ‘no’. The voiceover says that Chandramani has ‘revealed’ that a team from Delhi had gone there to ‘instruct’ her to answer in a particular manner with the PM. However, Chandramani, on camera on ABP News only says that she was ‘asked’ if she would be able to speak in front of the PM. Then another person came on camera to claim that a team had come and instructed them what to speak and Chandramani spoke what was told to her and that her claims of doubled income are not ‘visible’.

The voiceover then asks whether the government has started telling lies?

When we dug deeper into the issue, we found that MyNation had talked to the farmer and she has rubbished these claims and said senior journalists have twisted her words and used them selectively.

Kaushik had told PM Modi that her income had doubled after shifting from the traditional paddy-centric agriculture to fruit-pulp processing.

She had also told him during the interaction that while growing rice had been unprofitable, the new venture doubled her income. She said women had formed a self-help group and now marketing the pulp which brought them substantially more returns than just selling the fruit.

India First, a Facebook page has also shared both the video. Watch it and see how media are misrepresenting the facts to set a false narrative.

In the interaction video with Modi, Kaushik never said her income had been doubled by sowing rice/paddy. She clearly told the PM that the secret was her shifting to fruit and pulp processing. The key was ‘sitafal’ or ‘sharifa’ (custard apple).

Moreover in ABP video she never once said that she was either forced to lie or that her income had not doubled.

Doubling farm income by 2022 is one of the central projects of the Modi government to bring relief to the languishing farm sector. After this incident, one wonders if this was, as the BJP has been claiming for a long time, one of the many attempts solely to discredit the PM and set the narrative that everything is wrong with BJP government. 

Punya Prasun Bajpai must apologize for misleading his viewers.