New Delhi/São Paulo: The Brazilian ‘model’ whose photograph became the centrepiece of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s latest ‘vote chori’ claim isn’t a model. To answer Gandhi’s question — ‘ Yeh kaun hai (who is she?)’ — which he flashed across a giant screen during a live YouTube broadcast on Wednesday, she is Larissa Nery, a hairdresser who owns a salon in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Brazil’s second-largest state, Minas Gerais, and the country’s first planned modern city.

But Nery doesn’t know anyone outside her small circle in the city and has never left Brazil — let alone travelled to India to cast 22 votes in Haryana’s Assembly election last October.

“I think all of this is a comedy,” she told Luiz Fernando Menezes, a senior reporter at the Brazilian news agency Aos Fatos ,

See Full Page