An X post allegedly made by Republic TV is being shared on social media with the image of Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar claiming that he demanded the right for Muslims to vote four times in an election to ensure a fair and acceptable democratic process. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: Republic TV reported that Mani Shankar Aiyar’s statement that Muslims should be given the right to vote 4 times in an election to ensure a fair and acceptable democratic process.
Fact: Although this tweet was shared in 2018, it is no longer available. Multiple fact-checkers have pointed out that this is a parody account. Several fake tweets were fabricated and shared in the name of Republic TV before. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
On conducting a keyword search on the claim, we found that, in one of his articles, Mani Shankar Aiyar mentioned that the representation of Muslims in Parliament has significantly dropped to just 4 percent under the current government. However, we couldn’t find any other statements as claimed in the viral post.
Further, on searching for the post on the X account of Kanimozhi, we found that this tweet was posted in 2018 but the post is no longer available.
Further, we found that several fact-checkers indicating that this is a parody account, and we observed that numerous tweets were fabricated and shared in the name of Republic TV (here, here, and here). The authentic X account of Republic Media can be seen here.
We also discovered from the archives that the profile name was altered from “RepublicTv” to “republiictv” before the suspension of the account. This explains the difference in the spelling of the account name between the viral post and the post found on Kanimozhi’s account.
To sum up, an alleged tweet made by Republic TV quoting Mani Shankar Aiyar is from a parody account.
