Photographer falls. Rahul Gandhi hurries to his rescue, wins hearts
New Delhi: It took Rahul Gandhi all of three seconds to hurry down a couple of steps to reach the fallen photographer and extend a hand of succour.
The man had taken a painful tumble down those same steps — he landed on his back, then on his head and rolled over. The next thing he knew: he was being helped to his feet by the Congress president.
Where did this happen, you ask? At the Bhubaneswar airport.
One Congress member, Hasiba, couldn’t resist using the moment to take a potshot at Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Problem: She used a misleading video.
“Look at how Congress president Rahul Gandhi ran to pick up the photographer who fell,” she wrote in a tweet.
“Now compare this with the time a cop passed out while Modi was giving a speech. He turned, saw, pretended like nothing happened and continued with his speech,” she said.
She then tweeted this video, which had the Hindi caption: “It doesn’t matter if someone is dying, Modiji will continue giving his speech.”
It turns out that the man in the video (which others have now tweeted) was not dying.
Amitabh Pathak, the then Gujarat police chief, fainted, but later said he was “feeling much better”. The incident took place in 2013, when Narendra Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat.
A Print.in report from March 2018 describes how a video with the same Hindi caption was going viral at the time, and points out that Pathak died a week after the incident, while on holiday in Thailand.
