Prime Minister Narendra Modi's interview to News Nation may have already caused enough embarrassment to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters, but the fact-checking website Alt News now suggests the PM had prior knowledge of questions to be asked.
Alt News Co-founder Pratik Sinha created a thread on Twitter that suggested that the interview was scripted.
"PM Modi is asked to recite a recent poetry of his in the @NewsNationTV intvw. He asks for HIS file, which is duly handed over, and he starts fiddling with a bunch of papers. The paper on which there's a printed copy of a poetry also has a printed question on the top," Sinha posted on Twitter.
The post was accompanied by an image that showed part of that question -- I want to know from poet Narendra Modi if he's written anything in the past five years? -- as well as the poem.
"The part of question that is visible in the papers held by PM @narendramodi matches word-to-word to the question asked by the anchor Deepak Chaurasia," Sinha said.
He also posted a "slowed down" version of the video (sans audio) in which the Prime Minister flips through the papers present in his file.
Sinha's "thread" was retweeted thousands of times as people found new fodder for fun in the interview, which earlier drew a lot of criticism for what is now commonly referred to as Modi's "cloud theory" on the Balakot air strike.
Modi was trolled on Twitter for his remarks that he had asked the Air Force to carry out Balakot air strike on February 26 in bad weather as his "raw wisdom" said a cloud blanket would help the Indian fighter planes escape Pakistani radars.
The prime Minister also came under attack for claims of using digital camera, email in 1987-88.
"An interview clouded by radar claims, email claims, digital photography claims. Now this -- evidence that the interviewee already had the questions given to him," former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah tweeted.
