A viral video showing a person wrongly reciting the national song of India has gone viral with a claim that it shows Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Rameshwar Sharma during a rally organised as part of the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign.
This video has been shared as recent by many Congress leaders, including national spokesperson Rohan Gupta, and the Congress Minority Department.
As a part of the celebrations on India's 75 years of independence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had recently launched the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign, wherein he had asked all the citizens of the country to bring the national flag home and hoist it on Independence Day.
He had also urged the citizens to change their display picture on social media to the country's national flag.
However, we found that while the video did show Huzur MLA Sharma, it is from 2019 and isn't linked with the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign.
CLAIM
The claim was shared by the national spokesperson of Congress, Rohan Gupta, with a caption that read, "मध्यप्रदेश भाजपा विधायक रामेश्वर शर्मा हर घर तिरंगा अभियान के दौरान राष्ट्रगीत सुनाते हुए ।"
[Translation: Madhya Pradesh BJP MLA Rameshwar Sharma reciting the national song during the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign.]
The video was also shared by other verified handles belonging to the Congress party like the Maharashtra Pradesh Youth Congress, Congress MLA from MP Shashank Bhargava, and the Congress Minority Department.
The video was also shared by other social media users on Facebook and Twitter, archives of which can be found here and here.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We noticed a NewsTak logo on the top-right corner of the viral video. We conducted a keyword search with the BJP leader's name along with the name of the news outlet and found the video on the channel's YouTube handle, published on 4 January 2019.
The video was titled, "BJP नेताओं का वंदे मातरम् सुनकर, छूट जाएगी हंसी."
[Translation: You will be left laughing hearing BJP leaders sing Vande Mataram.]
Taking a cue from the video, we conducted a keyword search and found news reports about a protest rally held by BJP leaders at the Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel Park in Bhopal.
According to a report in the Hindustan Times, the protest was held against the then Kamal Nath-led Madhya Pradesh government’s decision to discontinue the practice of singing the national song 'Vande Mataram' at the state secretariat.
Kamal Nath later clarified that "the practice has just been postponed for sometime and it will be resumed in a new form."
A report in The Times of India said that the BJP leaders at the rally were unable to sing the song.
We also found a video uploaded on Twitter by Sharma on 2 January 2019, with a caption that when translated from Hindi, read, "We will sing Vande Mataram, we will sing till our last breath. Congress is following in Jinnah's footsteps by becoming a puppet in the hands of terrorism and dividing the country, but this country knows the truth about the sacrifice of the martyrs."
Evidently, an old video showing a BJP MLA wrongly singing 'Vande Mataram' was falsely linked with the recent 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign.
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