No, Owaisi Supporters Did Not Ditch Rally When He Criticised Modi

A video claiming Owaisi supporters left his rally after the AIMIM chief criticised PM Modi has gone viral.

A video claiming that Asaduddin Owaisi’s supporters decided to leave his rally en masse after he criticised PM Modi has been doing the rounds.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

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CLAIM

A video clip from what appears to be a public rally of AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi has been doing the rounds on social media.

The caption shared with the video claims that Owaisi’s supporters were miffed with him for criticising Prime Minister Narendra Modi and decided to leave his rally en masse.

In the 1:10-minute clip, the AIMIM leader can be heard criticising the ruling dispensation over some of its flagship schemes.

Following this, there appears to be some commotion near the stage that soon leads to chaos. Several members of the audience rush on to the stage while Owaisi continues to speak.

“When Owaisi started criticising Modi, the Muslim audience started quitting the meeting. He had to request them not to go by pleading, ‘I will not criticise or insult Modi... please don't go’,” the caption shared with the video read.

One such iteration of the clip – shared by Facebook page Resurging Dharma – was watched close to 19,000 times and shared 766 times, at the time of writing this piece.

It was also shared by several other individual users and pages on Facebook and Twitter:

The viral clip was shared by several individual Facebook users and pages.(Photo: The Quint)

THE TRUTH

On doing a reverse image search of a key frame from the video, it becomes clear that the video has clipped and taken out of context.

A reverse image search of a frame from the video returned several results.(Photo: The Quint)

The search led to a Zee News report about an incident involving Owaisi, where one of the audience members at an event in Mumbai had attempted to hit him with a shoe.

The report says that the incident had led to commotion as the one who had thrown the show – and missed – had managed to snake away from the venue.

Also, on carefully listening to the audio in the clip, Owaisi can be clearly heard as saying: “मोदी का नाम लिया तो बेचारे को तकलीफ हुई, अब और बोलूंगा (The unfortunate man was troubled when I took Modi’s name. Now, I’ll speak even more).”

Thus, the claim that Owaisi’s supporters had abandoned his rally after hearing PM Modi’s criticism is false.

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