Times Now faces backlash for erroneously calling Kerala 'Pakistan', channel issues apology

Times Now faced a massive backlash for a headline that said Amit Shah "Heads to Thundery Pakistan".

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If there is one thing the rest of India can learn about Kerala online, it is that you never mess with the state, even inadvertently. Times Now is the latest media house to get a taste of what it is to be on the wrong side of Kerala, after hordes of Malayalis and Keralites lashed out at the TV channel on social media for referring to the state as ‘Pakistan’, in what appears to be a genuine error.

On Friday, while Times Now was breaking the news that Amit Shah was arriving in Kerala amidst the heightened conflict between the centre and the state over the new cattle slaughter rules, one of the tickers on screen read – ‘Heads to thundery Pakistan’.

While most viewers in the country would have felt the thunder of the headline, Keralites was particularly outraged, assuming that Times Now is calling Kerala ‘Pakistan’ as an insult to their liberal (‘anti-Hindu’) politics over the beef issue. So, Kerala decided to give it back, in the same thunderous manner.

Some also pointed out that it wasn’t really an insult to call the state ‘Pakistan’.

And in a matter of a few hours, #ApologiseTimesCow shot up the charts of trending hashtags.

Clearly thunder-struck by the deluge of posts and tweets – some even abusive – directed at it online, Times Now has apologized for its mistake. The channel aired the apology on Saturday morning, calling it an “inadvertent error”.

Sources within Times Now told The News Minute that the newsroom was quite rattled by the verbal thrashing they received online for the 'genuine mistake', and that senior editors rushed to offer an apology before things got further out of hand.