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| - Fact Check: CIA survey on Indian poll results is a hoax
The first hint that the message is fake lies in the headline itself, which has a glaring grammatical error.
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India Today Fact Check
The BBC hasn't published any report about the CIA survey on Indian election.
Has the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), America's top spy agency, predicted a defeat for the NDA in the ongoing Lok Sabha polls?
If the message being circulated on social media is to be believed, the CIA has made the assessment based on a survey that the NDA will not be able to go beyond 177 seats, and in the worst-case scenario, it may come down to just 145 seats.
India Today's Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found this message to be totally fake. Neither the CIA has published any such survey nor has the BBC reported this news.
The headline in the message says: "The BJP will loose seats and can't make government in 2019 Lok Sabha polls, says CIA Survey." The message, detailing the number of seats the NDA is likely to win in each state, ends with a cryptic statement at the bottom "Prime Minister Narendra Modi is by far the most unreliable PM in the country ever."
The first hint that the message is fake lies in the headline itself, which has a glaring grammatical error. The correct usage is 'lose', and not 'loose' as the headline says. It is very unlikely that the BBC, which is known for its impeccable language, would make such a mistake.
The URL given in the viral message is correct and takes you to the homepage of BBC. However, there is no such news on the website. We also looked for any such news item of the BBC website with keywords but did not find anything.
We scanned through the website of the CIA using various keywords mentioned in the message. There was no trace of any such survey on the website.
We reached out to the BBC for a confirmation on this. The BBC via an email response said, "This fake survey on the Lok Sabha polls has been circulating on WhatsApp and Facebook, with messages claiming it to be from the BBC News. We'd like to make it absolutely clear that it is fake and does not come from the BBC. The BBC does not support pre-election surveys in India."
However, it looks like there is no dearth of people on Facebook and Twitter who were taken for a ride by this message or similar fake messages. Some of these messages circulating on social media talk about survey by KGB and MOSAD too, besides the CIA.
Interestingly, several Facebook pages have posted messages which also talk about similar surveys by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). However, these messages claim just the opposite predicting a landslide victory for the BJP with as much as 380 seats. A fact-check website 'Facthunt.in' had recently debunked this claim.
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