Where do fake AAP leaders come from?

Headlines Today’s slanderous show making allegations about Somnath Bharti was hardly the first they have gone after AAP leaders with “mistakes”. Here are two times when they have interviewed “AAP leaders” slandering the party. The glitch? Both of them are BJP.

Neither VK Malhotra nor Sanjay Kaul belong to AAP, and it would be rather tough to make this mistake. considering that random people can’t manifest out of thin air on a talk show, and they actually are invited. The few times I got invited at least, the content of the talk show and the stand I would represent was discussed briefly. I can’t imagine a talk show blindly inviting people without knowing about political leanings, simply because they at least pretend to show all sides of a controversy or debate. Of course, when Aam Aadmi Party supporters protested, it was an “inadvertent error”.

This would still be believable, if the channel weren’t littered with such mistakes. For example, a permanent Narendra Modi advertisement next to a show slandering an AAP Leader Somnath Bharti for selling porn sites with “experts” on internet fraud like Madhu Kishwar talking about how even if pornography were legal, it isn’t respectable. And allegations of a “scam” except, even the person who exposed the supposed scam, Conrad Longmore says no suits were filed against Topsites or Somnath Bharti by anyone for scamming them. I dare Rahul Kanwal to make the same claim about Bag It Today – a sister business of their channel, that incidentally checks all the “scam” markers – unsolicited emails, unsolicited phone calls, fraudulent offers that turn out to have hidden expenses, non delivery of items paid for and no refunds… only more bogus gift certificates that don’t get delivered either. And there are abundant complaints and consumer cases for cheating. Bag It Today has the honor of 179 reviews on mouthshut.com and a single star rating. That’s a pretty big consensus.

A show that incidentally proved about as much as the “sting” operation they had broadcast that alleged that AAP leaders took money to protest against people without any money actually changing hands. When the sting was exposed to be doctored, Headlines Today conveniently found a new controversy to ride and didn’t notice that expose.

But this also fits a similar impersonation earlier on India Today, the news magazine website affiliated with this channel, where they published an article slandering Aam Aadmi Party by one of its founders, Shanti Bhushan that echoed the BJP propagated myth of Aam Aadmi Party’s origins. Except, Shanti Bhushan NEVER WROTE THAT ARTICLE and sent them a legal notice over it. They took off the article, but I kept a copy here. It is written impersonating Shanti and you can read it for yourself to see if such a thing could have been published in “error”.