On 5th November, Wednesday, Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi was under radar after alleging that a Brazilian model’s photo was used to commit voter fraud in Haryana. But who is that model?
As per Gandhi, the image had been uploaded from a central server and used in 10 polling booths to cast 22 votes.
Since his press conference, social media users have been on a collective run to identify the woman in question.
The woman whose image landed in the middle of an Indian political controversy is Larissa Nery, a hairdressing professional from Minas Gerais, a state in southeastern Brazil.
She runs a salon in Belo Horizonte, the state capital of Minas Gerais and Brazil’s first planned modern city.
However, in a video posted online — translated from Portuguese — Larissa expressed shock, saying, “Guys, I can’t believe these people are gossiping. They’re using an old photo of mine; I was 18 or 20 in that photo. They’re portraying me as Indian to scam people. What madness! What craziness is this, what world do we live in?"
After fact-checker Mohammed Zubair posted the video on social media and pointed out that the photo displayed in Rahul Gandhi's press conference did not belong to an Indian voter, her response came after the image went viral. The discovery sparked a lot of internet debate, with some people making fun of the confusion and others wondering how the image was connected to Indian voter IDs.