Fact-check: Fake tweet shows Amit Shah saying he has bone cancer

A screenshot of Home Minister Amit Shah’s alleged tweet has gone viral on WhatsApp. As per the screenshot, Shah wrote in Hindi that he is suffering from bone cancer and seeks blessings from the Muslim community for a speedy recovery. The purported tweet is circulating in the backdrop of people questioning the Home Minister’s low profile during the COVID-19 outbreak that continues to rage.

The text in the viral image reads, “My fellow countrymen, each step that I took was for the nation’s well-being, I don’t hate any person from any caste or religion. Since the past few days due to poor health I haven’t been able to serve the citizens of the country, I am sad to share that I have bone cancer in the back of my throat. I hope during good months of Ramzan, Muslim community will also pray for my speedy recovery and I will be at your service soon.”

[Translated from: मेरे देश की जनता, मेरे द्वारा उठाया गया हर एक कदम देश हित में ही रहा है, मेरा किसी जाती या धर्म विशेष के व्यक्ति से कोई दुश्मनी नहीं है, कुछ दिनों से बिगड़े स्वास्थ के चलते देश की जनता की सेवा नहीं कर पा रहा हूं, यह बताते हुए दुख हो रहा है मुझे गले के पिछले हिस्से में बोन कैंसर हुआ है, में आशा करता हूं, रमज़ान के इस मुबारक महीने में मुस्लिम समाज के लोग भी मेरे स्वास्थ के लिए दुआ करेंगे औरजल्द ही स्वस्थ हो कर आपकी सेवा करूंगा।)”

Fake Twitter screenshot

The viral image of Home Minister Amit Shah’s tweet is not authentic. The tweet has been manufactured and this is evident from the inconsistencies.

1. Tweet is not in perfect alignment

The viral tweet has been manufactured to imitate how a tweet would look on a mobile phone. Alt News has compared it with a screenshot of a recent tweet by Shah. In the viral tweet, the text crosses over the red line towards the left and beyond the display picture.

2. Exceeds character count

At first glance itself, the text in the viral screenshot seems over the 280 character limit on Twitter. Alt News extracted the text from the image by saving the file and opening it in Google docs. Upon pasting the text on Twitter, we found that it has 149 extra characters.

3. Spelling and grammatical mistakes

The tweet carries more commas than required and only one full stop at the end. The entire paragraph is essentially one sentence. Furthermore, the word ‘जाति’ (caste) has been wrongly spelt as ‘जाती’, ‘स्वास्थ्य’ (health) as ‘स्वास्थ’, ‘मैं’ (Me) as ‘में’ and ‘और जल्द’ (and soon) as ‘औरजल्द’.

Therefore, a fake tweet is widely circulating on social media in the name of Amit Shah. Moreover, if such a tweet was put out from the Home Minister’s official account, it would not be taken down. But we were unable to find the tweet on Shah’s timeline. Even if we assume that the tweet has been deleted, there would be a clarification from the Home Minister which is not the case. In March, Alt News debunked two images that claimed Shah was infected with the coronavirus.