The soldiers in the image were sent on election duty, not free air travel by the central government. - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
April 1, 2019
A user has posted an image on Facebook saying that the BJP government has arranged flights for the soldiers in the army. Let’s try to analyze the claim made in the post.
The archived version of the post can be found here.
For the last 60 years, under the Congress government, soldiers have travelled in general bogies by lying down at the empty space near toilets. But when these images were sent to Modi and Suresh Prabhu, they arranged flights for the soldiers in the army.
The images were taken in 2016 when the ITBP (Indo-Tibetan Border Police) jawans were sent by the Election Commission of India for the election duty in Kerala. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
If the images in the post are properly observed, it can be seen that the badge on the soldiers’ uniform reads “ITBP” and they were travelling in an Air India plane. So, when searched for “ITBP Air India” on Google, in the search results it can be found that the ITBP soldiers were being moved to Kerala on election duty. Similar images of a different batch of ITBP soldiers being moved to Kerala by ECI for election duty were tweeted by ITBP on its official Twitter account.The above post which is being shared currently on Facebook has also been shared widely last year. At that time, some of the others fact-checkers like Boom Live and SMHoaxSlayer have already written fact-check articles on this news. But with recent Pulwama attack and General elections coming up, the fake post again resurfaced and being spread on social media.
Recently, after the Pulwama attack, the BJP did announce free air travel to CAPF jawans but only on specific routes. The Home Minister has tweeted regarding this on his Twitter account.Finally, the soldiers in the image were being sent by the ECI on election duty, not free air travel by the central government.