Old photo of Muslim boy carrying placard morphed to mock his community

A photo of a Muslim boy carrying a placard is widely being circulated on social media. The placard has a message written in Hindi that reads, “My father has four wives, 25 children and there is a lot of recession under Modi’s rule. We are dying of hunger, Modi is responsible for it”.

[Original text in Hindi: मेरे अब्बू के 4 बीबियाँ है 25 बच्चे है और मोदीराज में बहुत मंदी है. हम भूख से मर रहे है मोदी जिम्मेदार है.]

The photo has been viral on Facebook for a while now.

Morphed Image

We performed a reverse image search on Google and found that the photo has been morphed digitally and the original photo has a different message written on the placard. The original placard reads, “O, oppressors! don’t scare us with death threats. We didn’t hear of lullabies as children but the stories of Karbala”

[Original Hindi text: मरने से हमे ना डराओ एए जालिमो हमने बचपन मे लोरियाँ नहीं कर्बला की कहानियाँ सुनी है]

The photo was shared by the Facebook page of AIMIM Bokaro.

Below we have juxtaposed the two photos to show the dissimilarities between them. It is very clear that the photo has been digitally altered as the original text is visible on the morphed photo.

We performed a keyword search using the text that was originally written on the placard and found out that the message was popularised during the anti-CAA-NRC protest. At that time a similar photo of a girl carrying a placard with the same message was viral on Facebook. AIMIM leader Akhtarul Imam too had shared her photo.

Hence, a photo of a Muslim boy carrying a placard was digitally morphed and shared to mock the Muslim community.