Frustrated polls showing AAP losing, Kejriwal circulates fake polls, call media "pimps{
Thursday, February 02, 2017
AAP IT head shares fake survey after Kejriwal attacks news channel for
real survey (Op-India.Com)
Once upon a time, AAP and its supremo Arvind Kejriwal used to be a big fan of media and surveys, which used to show AAP gaining popular support. The survey findings were not unexpected as the party had emerged from a popular movement aided by the mainstream media and thus people wished to give it a chance. AAP used to put findings of such surveys on their campaign posters, especially during the Delhi assembly polls.
The party made an
impressive debut in 2013 Delhi assembly elections though ndia.ComKejriwal resigned
after just 49 days in power. Then came the 2014 general elections, where the
party performed impressively in Punjab winning 4 Lok Sabha seats. And then in
2015, it swept the Delhi assembly elections. Many surveys indicated that AAP
could repeat its Delhi performance in Punjab assembly elections too.
Two years have
passed since then. The party has seen internal feud that led to acrimonious
exit of founder member Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav, who now accuse the
party of being as good as any other political party. Governance in Delhi is
marred with controversies. And the party has been accused of hiding its source
of funding. In Punjab too, the party is embroiled in various controversies.
As a result, recent
surveys have indicated that AAP many not sweep the elections as was being
predicted earlier. Some surveys have even predicted that it could actually end
up at the third position.
This made Arvind
Kejriwal make a U-turn and he started asking people to not trust pre-poll
surveys by the media. This (click here) explains the U-turn of Kejriwal over the issue.
Now Kejriwal has gone
a step ahead and accused a news channel of taking bribes for showing AAP on the
third spot in a pre-poll survey. Kejriwal made this accusation on Sunday
against TV channel News24.
Not just
he accused the channel’s owner of taking bribes, he called some journalists
(without taking names) “dalaal” (pimps):
This is not the
first time Kejriwal has referred to journalists as pimps. Earlier he had
identified former Indian Express Editor Shekhar Gupta as a pimp.
On expected lines,
Kejriwal was not attacked by the journalistic fraternity as he continues to
enjoy considerable support among them. Earlier Kejriwal had shared a picture on
Twitter that showed a newspaper page being designed. This suggested that he had
loyal supporters working in newspapers who leak to him the news even before
it’s published.
Nonetheless, after
Kejriwal attacked media and declared the unfavourable pre-poll survey “paid”,
his team has now gone ahead and started circulating images of surveys that show
AAP winning around 100 seats in Punjab. Some of these are the old surveys,
while others are fake.
One such fake survey
was shared by the IT head of the Aam Aadmi Party Ankit Lal, which claimed that
Today’s Chanakya – the research group that had correctly predicted 2014 general
elections and 2015 Delhi assembly election results – had predicted 100 seats
for the party in Punjab elections.
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