Valley blooper in new BJP ad

The Delhi unit of BJP has embarrassed the party’s top brass with an advertising folly. The party used photograph of an NGO, Anhad, protesting the use of security forces in Kashmir to accuse the UPA government of failing to tackle terrorism in the valley on eve of party’s Kashmir Bachao Divas, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Aug 22, 2010, 01:18:10 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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After Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, it is the turn of the Delhi BJP to embarrass the party’s top brass with another advertising folly.

This time, the party used a photograph of NGO Anhad activists protesting the use of security forces in Kashmir to accuse the UPA government of failing to tackle terrorism in the valley on eve of party’s Kashmir Bachao Divas.

The NGO had been most vocal critic of BJP since the Gujarat riots and even filed a petition in Supreme Court against the state government in alleged fake encounter of Samir Pathan.

“Use of photograph without our permission... goes beyond your Kashmir Bachao Divas as Anhad and BJP are two diame-trically opposite organizations,” said Anhad’s managing trustee Shabnam Hashmi, in a letter to BJP president Nitin Gadkari.

The photograph is of Anhad activists in a Kashmir-related protest in New Delhi. The picture was used in full-page advertisements in two national newspapers with a caption “in protest against UPA government’s failure to tackle terrorist and separatist forces in Kashmir”.

Hashmi warned of legal action if the BJP did not apologise.

Delhi BJP president Vijender Gupta said “It was an unintentional error. The advertising company may had put a backgrounder and by mistake may have used Anhad photograph”.

In June, the Gujarat government had used a photograph of Muslim girls in UP’s Shibli Inter College to showcase how Muslim girls were doing well in the Narendra Modi-ruled state.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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