Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met on 11 and 12 October in the coastal town of Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu. But ahead of the informal summit between the two leaders, ‘#GoBackModi’ was trending on Twitter.
Now a video is being shared by a Twitter user ‘Geetika Swami’ with her 41,100 followers which shows huge crowds cheering for PM Modi while he walks down the road with his security. The video, at the time of writing this article, had been retweeted over 2,000 times and has garnered over 6,000 reactions.
The claim along with the video reads, “Those who think Modi’s popularity in Tamilnadu is a myth must watch this video. The madi magic is sure to leave you spellbound! #DontGoBackModi #NarendraModi (sic).”
An archived version of this tweet can be viewed here.
WHAT’S THE TRUTH
The video clipping is actually from 13 December 2017, when PM Narendra Modi had visited Gujarat to cast his vote during the 14th Legislative Assembly elections. After casting his vote, Modi walked out of the polling booth and walked on the road where a frenzied crowd waited for him.
Moreover, the audio of this video has been manipulated. The original audio is that of the crowd cheering.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
On conducting a reverse image search on one of the key frames of the vidoe, we came across a video uploaded by a YouTube channel called ‘Herbag world Hindi’ which was uploaded in 2017.
Using ‘Twitter advance search’ we then looked for media uploaded by the official BJP page in the same year. We came across a similar video which was from Gujarat in December 2017 during the Assembly elections. The visuals were similar, but didn’t match the one in the viral video.
Taking a cue from here here we searched with keywords ‘Modi 2017 Gujarat elections’ and came across a video by English news channel NDTV. These visuals too showed Modi standing in the queue to cast his ballot and then greeting the people.
Although the visuals aren’t the same but there are similarities which shows that the video shared by Swami is indeed from Gujarat in 2017.
So the claim that the visuals show people welcoming Modi in Tamil Nadu during his recent visit is completely false.
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