A fake quote attributed to Congress leader Kapil Sibal has resurfaced on the internet ahead of the Bhoomi Poojan scheduled at the Ram Mandir site in Ayodhya on 5 August. According to the false quote, Sibal had once claimed that “he will die if Ram Mandir is built.”
THE CLAIM
The claim, which is being widely circulated on Facebook and WhatsApp says that “Kapil Sibal once said that he will die by suicide if Ram Mandir is built.” ( कपिल सिब्बल ने एकबार कहा था राम मंदिर निर्माण शुरू होने पर वो आत्महत्या कर लेंगे)
The same claim also went viral in 2019 ahead of the Ayodhya verdict in the Supreme Court.
WHAT WE FOUND
The fact that this statement was not reported by the mainstream media raised some doubts about its veracity. We searched Google and found no reports, current or old, which carried this quote by the former UPA minister.
In fact, we found a blog post by a user called योगी आदित्यनाथ की सेना (Yogi Adityanath’s Army) on WordPress from March 2018, which attributed the quote to Kapil Sibal.
After reading the article we found that it nowhere mentions Sibal saying that he won’t let Ram Mandir be constructed till he is alive. The article only quotes Sibal as saying that “Ram Mandir will be constructed when Lord Ram wishes so, not as per the wish of Modi.” There is no explanation as to where the headline of the article came from.
The same quote attributed to Kapil Sibal went viral in 2019 ahead of the Supreme Court verdict in the Ram Janmabhoomi and Babri Masjid land dispute case and was debunked by fact-checking website Alt News.
For further verification, The Quint reached out to a Congress functionary, who said that the claim is completely false.
Evidently, a fake quote is being shared on social media in the name of senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal in the wake of Ram Mandir Bhoomi Poojan scheduled on 5 August.
Before Sibal, Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav became a target of fake news when a false quote claiming that “SP would never have let the construction of Ram Mandir begin if the party was in power” was attributed to him. You can read our fact-check here.
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