Fake The Wire Report About China 'Trying to Annex Indian Land' Goes Viral

This is a fabricated screenshot of an article shared by The Wire.

A screenshot of an article purportedly shared The Wire is going viral on social media to claim that China is planning to "annex parts of Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim."

The headline in the viral image reads, "China is all set to annex Arundachal Pradesh and Sikkim as part of South Tibet after Modi govt was successfully coerced by Beijing" (sic).

(Archives of similar claims can be found here and here.)

What's the truth?: The Wire did not share an article with this headline, this image is altered.

How did we find out the truth?: We noticed a misspelling which incorrectly mentions Arunachal Pradesh as "Arundachal Pradesh".

• Next, we performed a relevant keyword search on Google and found no article with this headline shared by The Wire.

• We also checked The Wire's social media platforms and their official website but found no trace of this report.

The original piece: We found a different opinion piece authored by Pravin Sawhney and published on The Wire's website but this was shared on 3 October 2024.

• The report's title read, "Why Mutual Trust Will Elude India, China Despite Patrolling 'Deal', Modi-Xi Meeting."

• It did not include any of the claims mentioned in the viral screenshot.

We reached out to Soumashree Sarkar, News Editor, The Wire, who confirmed to us that the report seen in the viral screenshot is not original.

• "No piece under Pravin Sawhney's byline was published on October 29 at all," she adds.

• We also noticed that the date format seen in the viral screenshot and the original article is different.

The image used in the viral screenshot: The map used in the viral image is not from The Wire either.

• We performed a reverse image search on Google with some relevant keywords and found it in the International Crisis Group's report titled "Thin Ice in the Himalayas: Handling the India-China Border Dispute".

• This was published on 14 November 2023 and it refers to the map as the "Map of the Eastern Sector of the Line of Actual Control (LAC)."

Conclusion: A fabricated screenshot is going viral to claim that The Wire shared a report about China planning to "annex the Indian territory".

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