Fact Check: Old image from Jat agitation for ongoing farmers’ protest
Team News Riveting
“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels.
Among psychologists something like this known as the “illusion of truth” effect. Farmer’s agitation seems to be a typical experiment on how the effect works: participants rate how true trivia items are, things like “a rail engine with a corporate banner” or “boycotting a telecom service.” They see a parallel version that isn’t true, something like a banner enough to determine “selling the Indian Railways.”
What does the farmers’ agitation have to do with selling Indian railways or mobile service providers? The chemistry of the issue has many complications. The social media, wittingly, is buzzed with such “lies.” Ironically, it later clarifies that the report is fake.
In the pretext of farmer stir, a big strategy against the indigenous corporate houses seems to be taking shape. And it comes at a time when trade competition across the Globe has assumed significance.
Noteworthy, the Indian corporate behemoths translating the AtmaNirbhar and Make-in-India concept into action are singled out by a lot of protesters and many on social media.
When the fake news failed to click, the farmers leaders opposing the India Farm Reforms 2020 openly started the campaign to boycott any product or commodity linked to businesses owned by corporate groups of Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani. A large chunk of this will presumably involve mobile phone connections of Reliance Jio, which is India’s largest mobile network operator by market share right now.
Similarly, vain attempt has been made to malign Adani Group in the fake propaganda apropos grain pricing, corporate farming or farmland acquisition. The accusation is far from facts.
The company has no role in deciding the volume of storage as well as pricing of grain as it is only a service and infrastructure provider for the Food Corporation of India (FCI).
FCI buys food grains from farmers and stores them in silos built through a public-private partnership. While private players are paid a fee for building and storing the food grains, the ownership of the commodity as well as its marketing and distribution rights belong to FCI.
FCI has partnered with private investors to commission high tech silos equipped with latest fumigation and preservation techniques for food grains for two to four years and dispatch it in bulk form through special trains across India. Adani Group has been into the business of developing and operating grain silos for FCI since 2005. The company does not own any food grains procured from farmers, and in no way connected to the pricing of grains.
