No, this building is not a local office of the Indian National Congress party
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on April 11, 2019 at 06:20
- 4 min read
- By AFP India
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Multiple online posts, for example this one published on Facebook April 3, 2019, and shared more than 1,700 times since, contain photos of the detached two-storey building, which also has a green flag and white star-and-crescent feature on the roof.
The posts claim the building is an office of the Indian National Congress party in Wayanad district in south Indian state of Kerala.
Congress is running in Indian elections held from April 11 to May 19. Here is the party's website and here is an AFP report on its campaign.
Translated to English, the post’s Hindi-language caption says: “This is the party office of Congress party in Wayanad, Kerala. Now you can imagine that's why Congress was soft on peace messengers in their manifesto.”
Below is a screenshot of the false post:
The same images and claim have been shared elsewhere on Facebook, for example in this post that has been shared more than 350 times since being published April 4, 2019, and on Twitter for example here.
The building is not a Congress office; it belongs to another political party, the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML). Here is the IUML’s website.
The IUML flag, which is green with a white star and crescent, matches the designs on the building in the posts.
Below is an image containing two screenshots – one of the IUML website (L) and another of the party’s official letterhead as seen here on India’s election commission website (R).
AFP has circled the images of the party flag in red:
Green is a holy colour in Islam and the star and crescent is a Muslim emblem used in many contexts including to decorate mosques, according the Encyclopedia of Islam (2009) by Juan Eduardo Campo, viewed on Google Books here and here.
In the photo of the building in the false Facebook posts, there are multiple signs written in Kerala's regional language.
AFP examined some of these signs, highlighted in the image below using the letters A to G:
Below are translations of these signs into English, some with explanations:
A: "Iqbal Nagar League House", the name of the building.
B: "Smaraka Saudam", which means “Memorial House” in English.
C: "I Moidu Haji", the name of an IUML activist killed in 2001. Here is a report dated December 2012 on his murder case.
D: "League House"
E: "Iqbal Nagar", part of Kanhangad town in Kerala's Kasaragod district. This is written on an electricity pole.
F: A poster of Syed Muhammedali Shihab. Shihab was the president of the Kerala state committee of the IUML, who passed away in 2009. Here is a website dedicated to him.
G: A poster of Rajmohan Unnithan, the United Democratic Front (UDF) candidate in Kasaragod. The UDF is an alliance in Kerala led by Congress which also includes IUML. Here is a report in The Hindu about Unnithan’s campaign.
Kanhangad is around 120 kilometres (75 miles) from Wayanad district, according to this online map.
The IUML’s district president MC Kamaruddin confirmed to AFP that the picture shows a party building in Iqbal Nagar, Kasaragod, Kerala.
He said: “This is the party office of IUML which was inaugurated in February by the IUML Youth League president Munnawar Ali Shihab Thangal.”
On February 27, 2019, an invitation to the building’s inauguration was shared on Facebook here by Kerala Muslim League leader AP Moidu, in a post embedded below:
The first part of the post's caption translates to English as: “With the support of the Ajanur Iqbal Nagar Zone Muslim League, I Moidu Haji Memorial House will be inaugurated at 3pm on Wednesday, 27 Feb 2019, followed by a public conference."
The image below compares a screenshot of the misleading Facebook post (L) with a screenshot of the building from the Facebook post advertising its inauguration (R):
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