Vijay Goel, a former Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs, and former president of the Bharatiya Janata Party's Delhi unit, shared a photo of a large crowd gathered around a water tanker, and claimed that it showed a recent water crisis under the Arvind Kejriwal-led government.
BOOM found this claim to be false; the photo was taken in June 2009, three years before Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party was conceived. During the then-water crisis in the country's capital, the state was under the Indian National Congress, with Sheila Dixit as Chief Minister.
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Sharing the photo on Twitter, Goel wrote, "दिल्ली में पानी का हॉल, कुछ करो भैया केजरीवाल." (English translation: The state of water in Delhi, do something brother Kejriwal.)
Click here to view an archived version of Goel's tweet.
At the time of writing this article, the tweet had gotten more than 500 retweets and quote tweets combined, and had garnered around 1,700 likes.
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Photo from 2009
Delhi's ruling party Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), promptly responded from its official account to the tweet with a screenshot of the same photo on the website of stock photo agency Alamy. The description of the photo in the screenshot showed that it was from June 2009.
Taking a dig at Goel, AAP's official handle wrote, "Vijay Goel Ji, Are you nostalgic that you're sharing photos from 2009, or was it a deliberate attempt to defame Kejriwal Govt?"
To confirm AAP's counter claim to Goel's tweet, BOOM did a reverse image search of the viral photo on Google. We were led to a link on Alamy of the same photo, which stated that the photo is in fact 12 years old.
According to the description, the image showed residents of Delhi's Sanjay Colony crowd around a Delhi Jal Board-run water tanker. The description also highlights that the tanker was provided under the directives of then-Chief Minister Sheila Dixit, during a water crisis in the city, which the media reported was due to uneven water distribution in the city.
The image was taken three years before the conception of AAP, which came to power in the state in 2015.
