Senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s much-awaited “H-bomb” press conference, in which he alleged large-scale irregularities in the Haryana Assembly elections last year and made claims of vote theft again, has brought a mystery woman into public focus.
Gandhi claimed that the photograph of a woman wearing a blue denim jacket appears 22 times in the voter list for Haryana’s Rai Assembly constituency.
“Who is this lady? How old is she? Which state does she come from? What's her name? Can anyone try? Where is she from?” Gandhi asked reporters at the press conference.
When someone in the audience pointed out that she does not appear to be from Haryana, Gandhi responded, “But she votes 22 times in Haryana, and she votes in 10 different booths in Haryana and she has got multiple names: Seema, Sweety, Saraswati, Rashmi, Vimla. This is a centralised operation. Somebody fed this lady into the electoral list at a centralised level, not at the booth level.”
"She is from Brazil. She is a Brazilian model. That's a stock photograph," Gandhi said during his press conference.
According to a news report by NDTV, the picture, which has been named 'woman wearing blue denim jacket’, is available for free download on stock photo websites like Unsplash and Pexels.
The photographer who clicked the picture is Matheus Ferrero. He is based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The image was published on March 2, 2017, and has been downloaded more than four lakh times from the two sites. While it is likely the model is Brazilian, her identity has not been confirmed.
“The Election Commission can remove duplicates in a second. Why don't they do it? Reason: they are helping the BJP,” Gandhi said. He also played a video of Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini, where the BJP leader was seen saying that “arrangements” had been made ahead of the results. “I am questioning the Election Commission and the democratic process in India, and I am doing this with 100 per cent proof,” Gandhi said during his press conference.
Meanwhile, the same image of the woman has also surfaced across several LinkedIn profiles, from an Indore-based Senior Software Engineer at Meta to a Cloud Engineer at L&T and an Office Manager in Washington DC. At least eleven fake professional accounts have been found using her photo, stretching from Los Angeles in the US to Bahawalpur in Pakistan.
Other such accounts include a Delhi-based marketing manager, a Bengaluru-based senior software engineer at Amazon, a Mumbai-based interior designer, and an Ahmedabad-based engineer at Microsoft. Most of these profiles appear fake and largely inactive, India Today reported.
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