The Brazilian photographer, whose name started trending yesterday after Rahul Gandhi's massive allegations of vote fraud in the Haryana polls last year, has had to delete his Instagram account.
Matheus Ferrero, based in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, clicked a woman's photo in 2017 and shared it online with her permission. The photograph, titled 'woman wearing blue denim jacket', is available for free download on stock photography websites such as Unsplash and Pexels. It has been downloaded over 4 lakh times from these two websites and used in multiple publications. Yesterday, Gandhi shared the photograph while accusing the Election Commission of vote fraud. Thousands of kilometres away, Ferrero was caught in the middle of a social media storm.
Ferrero had shared the photograph on several websites, and many assumed that the Brazilian woman's name was Matheus Ferrero. Aos Fatos, a Brazilian news agency, spoke to the photographer. He has said he had to delete his Instagram account after millions of social media users searched for Ferrero's social media profiles after Gandhi's big charge. "They literally hacked all my accounts. There were a lot of strange people saying all sorts of things," he said. According to Ferrero, people may not have understood that it was a photo downloaded from a free platform.
The woman, Larissa Nery, has told Aos Fatos that she is not a model and had posed for the photograph to help out a friend. The photographer, Ferrero, sought her permission to share the image online, and she allowed it.
In a video that has now gone viral, Nery is seen clarifying that the photograph Gandhi shared during a press conference yesterday was taken years ago.
"Guys, they are using an old photo of mine. It's an old photo, okay? I was like 18 or 20 years old. I don't know if it's an election or something about voting... And in India. Ah! They're portraying me as Indian to scam people, guys. What madness! What craziness is this? What world do we live in?" the woman says in the video.
READ: "What Madness Is This?" Brazilian Woman Viral After Rahul Gandhi H-Bomb
Larissa's photograph went viral after Rahul Gandhi's fresh round of allegations of vote fraud. He alleged that the Election Commission facilitated poll irregularities in the Haryana election last year. In yesterday's press conference, Gandhi alleged that the photograph of a Brazilian woman appears 22 times in the voter list for Haryana's Rai Assembly seat.
When someone in the audience pointed out that she did not appear to be from Haryana, Gandhi replied, "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."
Showing more instances of voter IDs with the same pictures but different names, Gandhi said, "The Election Commission can remove duplicates in a second. Why don't they do it? Reason: they are helping the BJP."
"I am questioning the Election Commission and the democratic process in India, and I am doing this with 100 per cent proof. We are sure that a plan was put in motion to convert Congress's landslide victory into a loss," he said.
Sources in the Election Commission questioned what polling agents of the Congress were doing on voting day. "They are supposed to object if the elector has already voted or if they doubt the identity of the elector," a source said. The source also asked if Rahul Gandhi supports the Special Intensive Revision aimed at removing duplication from voter lists and striking off names of those who have died or moved from a particular constituency.
Union Minister Kiren Rijiju said Rahul Gandhi talks about "fake issues". "Polling is happening in Bihar, yet he's telling stories about Haryana. There's nothing left in Bihar, so he's shifting the narrative to Haryana." The Leader of the Opposition, he said, should speak on serious issues.
"They say they were winning in exit polls and opinion polls. But there's always a difference between poll predictions and actual results. This keeps happening - it's nothing new. We never made any allegations against the Election Commission," he said.
