An image is going viral on social media, claiming to show a Pakistani man named Saddam Hussain holding Pakistan's national flag, who is purportedly fighting for Indian democracy alongside Indian content creator and activist Dhruv Rathee.
(An archived version of a similar claim can be found here.)
Is it true?: No, the claim is false, as the image is AI-manipulated.
The man confirmed to the The Quint that he is an Indian citizen hailing from Gujarat.
How did we find out?: We ran a reverse image search on the image using Google Lens and found a post by Rathee sharing images from the Instagram account of the man who was claimed to be posing with a Pakistani flag.
However, the image Rathee shared does not show the man holding a Pakistani flag.
The post is captioned, "Charanvandana couple spreading fake news once again. Do you get orders from BJP directly to defame Indian citizens like this?"
We went through the official Instagram account of the man in the image, named Saddamhusen Makarani, and found a post from 2021 that resembles the viral image.
But the image does not show him holding the national flag.
He also posted a screenshot of Dhruv Rathee's X post along with a caption stating that the official Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) account of Delhi falsely claimed that he is Pakistani and posted an edited image with a Pakistani flag.
He also confirmed in the post that he is an Indian citizen.
The Quint reached out to Makarani, who categorically stated that he is an Indian citizen.
He shared the original photograph with us, which showed the original version of him standing with a smartphone and without a flag in his hand, which was taken in August 2021.
In a new post on Instagram, Makarani clarified that he is an Indian citizen who lived in India for 30 years before migrating to the UK, where he has been living for the last six years.
Showing his Indian passport, Makarani added that he was from Gujarat, the same state as the country's prime minister and home minister, calling out BJP Delhi's post, saying that they edited an old photo to call him a Pakistani.
Is it AI?: We ran the image through Hive Moderation, an AI detector.
According to the tool, the image is 99.9 percent likely to have been generated by AI.
We ran the image through an AI detector, Sightengine, which indicated it is very likely AI-generated.
Next, we ran the image through SynthID Detector, which concluded the content was generated or edited using OpenAI tools because it detected a SynthID watermark.
Conclusion: The image is AI-generated and does not show an authentic image of the man holding a Pakistani national flag.
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