Was there malicious intent behind Jyoti Basu death rumors? - The whole story behind Jyoti Basu’s fake death rumors
Yesterday Twitter and later internet was abuzz with rumors of death of Jyoti Basu. Upon investigation I found out that the single website source of these rumors is a unknown site named kalponik.us.
The domain record of the kalponik.us reveals that the domain registrant is a guy named Shuvon Rudra, from Dhaka, Bangladesh. The administrative contact lists F,loreance Ria from Dhaka and the technical contact is listed as Rudra Netguru from Coochbihar, West Bengal, India. I tried all the telephone numbers listed for them and none of the number is valid!
Initially the site claimed that Jyoti Basu was dead at 1:30 pm based on insider information it has received and boasted that kalponik.us is responsible for breaking the news. Indihot soon picked up the story from there and sometime later samaylive followed. Apparently the site came under some pressure later in the day when doctors claimed that Jyoti Basu was alive and in fact improving. The text was changed. It still said that Jyoti Basu is dead but linked to the article from samaylive, which (I have read both the original articles) obviously picked up the story from kalponik (a incidentally is a Bengali word meaning imaginary), conveniently blanked out the page with zero content!
To summarize when faced with heat kalponik decided to link as source samaylive which had based its story on kalponik in the first place! Also kalponik had claimed initially that it had broken the story. So kalponik is playing an unethical game here. Additionally it removed the story from front page. It appears at this time that kalponik had staged the whole thing to probably gain some cheap publicity.