A screenshot purporting to show Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif criticising India's Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA) and proposing a similar law in Pakistan for Indian Muslims, is fake. BOOM found that Sharif did not post anything on his official X handle on CAA.
The Central government on March 11, 2024 notified the rules for the implementation of CAA which fast-tracks the process of granting Indian citisenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians who migrated to India owing to religious persecution in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. CAA was passed in 2019 and was met with widespread protests across the country as it was criticised for being discriminatory against Muslims.
The viral screenshot claiming to be posted from Sharif's official X handle on March 11, 2024, reads, "To counter Indian Govt's undemocratic and communal CAA, the Govt of Pakistan has decided to notify Pakistan's own CAA, in which Indian Muslims who feel persecuted in India will be given the citizenship of Pakistan."
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The same screenshot is being shared on Facebook widely with the false claim and the caption trolling Indian Muslim journalists including Rana Ayyub, Mohammed Zubair and Arfa Sherwani.
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FACT-CHECK
BOOM found that the viral screenshot is fake, and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has not posted anything regarding CAA on his official X handle.
On checking Sharif's official handle, we did not find any post after March 10, 2024, as the viral screenshot claims.
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We also checked archiving websites like Wayback Machine and Archive.is and did not find any anti-CAA post by Sharif posted recently. We also ran an advanced X keyword search and did not find any replies to deleted post by Sharif's official X handle.
The viral screenshot claims that the post got around 45 thousand views and 1,253 reposts, however there is no other screenshot of the same post or any news reports reporting on it, as would be the case if the Pakistan's prime minister had tweeted the same.
