Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal shared a link by a website called News24India (news24india.org), which claimed that British prime ministerial candidate Rishi Sunak has been inspired by Kejriwal and Aam Aadmi Party's Delhi Model. BOOM found this website to be obscure and little known, and having links to AAP supporters.
This claim was made in the backdrop of Sunak recently pledging £10 billion to provide pay-outs to people to subsidise for the soaring energy costs in the country.
Ahead of coming to power in Delhi, Kejriwal too had taken up the issue of energy prices as his core electoral issue. The obscure website he shared on Twitter insinuates that his style of governance, particularly on bringing down energy costs, has inspired Sunak to emulate it in the United Kingdom.
Click here to view an archive of the above tweet.
We looked through news reports of Sunak making the announcement to bring down energy charges if elected, and did not find a single reference to indicate that the AAP-led Delhi government or Kejriwal might have inspired him to make the announcement.
Furthermore, we looked through the website shared by Kejriwal, and found it to be sparsely populated with curated articles, without any names in the byline.
We also looked at the Facebook and Twitter links provided in the website. The Facebook link led us to a page that has since been deleted. The Twitter account, going by the handle News_24India, did not exist either.
We also found a Facebook page going by the name News24 India, which shared multiple links from the website shared by Kejriwal. The 'page information' section of this page, which has now been deleted, revealed that it was first created with the name 'Dimpal Singh fans'.
However, by entering the link to the defunct handle (https://twitter.com/news_24India) into Wayback Machine, we found that the same Twitter handle once went by another name - Aam Aadmi Party Udham Singh Nagar. The bio of that account described it as an official Twitter handle of AAP's Uttarakhand unit.
We matched the Twitter IDs of the both handles and found them to be the same Twitter ID - 1410940833524686851.
We also found another handle belonging to this website - @News24India_. While this handle was active, and posted links from the website, it had only 15 followers, and its tweets were devoid of any interactions.
This shows that the website Kejriwal shared to insinuate that Sunak is emulating his strategy of bringing down energy costs to secure his position as the new prime minister, is an obscure website with links to Aam Aadmi Party supporters.
Additional reporting by Sujith A.
