Former Congress leader Hardik Patel left the party on 18 May and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on 2 June. Soon after, a video showing a person slapping Patel went viral on social media.
The claim that accompanied the video took a dig at Patel by saying that this was how he was welcomed by the public after he joined the BJP.
However, the video dates back to 2019 when Patel was still with the Congress party. A person named Tarun Gajjar had slapped Patel at a public rally in Gujarat for the 'problems' that Gajjar had undergone during the Patidar reservation agitation in Ahmedabad in 2015. Patel was the face of the Patidar agitation, which was aimed at bringing the community within the ambit of the OBC reservation quota.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We noticed the logos of news agency ANI and news organisation Hindustan Times, on the top-right corner of the viral video.
We did a keyword search on Google using 'Hardik Patel slapped ANI,' and came across a tweet by ANI that was on 19 April 2019 and carried the same video of Patel getting slapped.
The tweet read, "#WATCH Congress leader Hardik Patel slapped during a rally in Surendranagar, Gujarat."
We also found a YouTube video uploaded by Hindustan Times on 19 April 2019.
Several media outlets like The Times of India and The Hindu covered this incident in 2019.
Another tweet by ANI stated that the person who slapped Patel was later identified as Tarun Gajjar, and he had attacked Patel because he allegedly faced problems with regards to his pregnant wife and child during the Patidar agitation in Gujarat in 2015.
Gajjar also took a dig at Patel by calling him 'Gujarat's Hitler' for trying to shut down the state by calling for repeated bandhs.
Evidently, an old video from 2019 was shared with a false claim that Patel was welcomed by a slap after he joined the BJP recently.
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