Congress poster in ‘fake’ image storm

Mumbai: A Congress poster that sought to portray the negligence of the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rule ahead of the civic poll via a jam-packed road in Mumbai surprisingly features cycle rickshaws in the traffic.

The poster, which is part of a new campaign against the BJP-Sena-led Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), was doing the rounds on Twitter, with people claiming that it’s a fake picture as cycle rickshaws don’t ply on the city’s streets. However, Mumbai Congress has said the campaign has not been officially launched and a trial picture had been leaked.

With tagline “Man Badala, Mumbai Badalel” (Change your opinion to change Mumbai) Congress Mumbai will be launching its campaign from Friday for the BMC polls. It is going to launch 14 photos that will highlight the ‘failures’ of the Shiv Sena, which include traffic jam, water woes, choked gutters, pothole-ridden roads and flooding during the monsoon. However, Twitterati were quick to point out that one of the photos of a traffic jam that got leaked on Twitter was clearly not of Mumbai. They also circled the cycle rickshaws in the photos and ridiculed the campaign.

Reacting on the issue, Mumbai president Sanjay Nirupam said that the party has not launched the campaign yet. “We will be launching the campaign tomorrow with 14 photos. The one on Twitter was a trial photo. We know that it is not from Mumbai. We have rejected couple of such photos from the main campaign. It is not officially there on our website or Twitter.  The photos we are going to release will show the real plight of Mumbai,” Mr Nirupam said.

The Congress will soon be declaring its manifesto for the BMC polls. It will be contesting all 227 seats alone. The Congress had contested the last election in alliance with the Nationalist Congress Party.