A screenshot of Home Minister Amit Shah’s alleged tweet has gone viral on WhatsApp. As per the screenshot, Shah wrote in Hindi that he is suffering from bone cancer and seeks blessings from the Muslim community for a speedy recovery. The purported tweet is circulating in the backdrop of people questioning the Home Minister’s low profile during the Covid-19 outbreak that continues to rage.
The text in the viral image reads, “My fellow countrymen, each step that I took was for the nation’s well-being, I don’t hate any person from any caste or religion. Since the past few days due to poor health I haven’t been able to serve the citizens of the country, I am sad to share that I have bone cancer in the back of my throat. I hope during good months of Ramzan, Muslim community will also pray for my speedy recovery and I will be at your service soon.”
Alt News has received several requests to fact-check this on WhatsApp (+91 76000 11160) and on our official Android application.
Fake Twitter screenshot
The viral image of Home Minister Amit Shah’s tweet is not authentic. The tweet has been manufactured and this is evident from the inconsistencies.
Tweet is not in perfect alignment
Alt News has compared the viral image with a screenshot of a recent tweet by Shah. In the viral tweet, the text crosses over the red line towards the left and beyond the display picture.
Exceeds character count
At first glance itself, the text in the viral screenshot seems over the 280 character limit on Twitter. Alt News extracted the text from the image by saving the file and opening it in Google docs. Upon pasting the text on Twitter, we found that it has 149 extra characters.
Spelling and grammatical mistakes
The tweet carries more commas than required and only one full stop at the end. The entire paragraph is essentially one sentence. Furthermore, the word ‘जाति’ (caste) has been wrongly spelt as ‘जाती’, ‘स्वास्थ्य’ (health) as ‘स्वास्थ’, ‘मैं’ (Me) as ‘में’ and ‘और जल्द’ (and soon) as ‘औरजल्द’.
+Therefore, a fake tweet is widely circulating on social media in the name of Amit Shah. Moreover, if such a tweet was put out from the Home Minister’s official account, it would not be taken down. But we were unable to find the tweet on Shah’s timeline. Even if we assume that the tweet has been deleted, there would be a clarification from the Home Minister which is not the case. In March, Alt News debunked two images that claimed Shah was infected with the coronavirus.