Clipped Video Shared to Claim UP CMO Stopped Taking Yogi Adityanath’s Calls

The video is from 2020 and shows Adityanath reprimanding government officials for not taking legislators' calls.

A video of a news bulletin showing Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath speaking about phone call etiquette and criticising the lack of it is being shared to claim that government officials in Uttar Pradesh have already stopped taking Adityanath's calls, days before the state's Assembly election results are scheduled to be announced.

However, the video is clipped and is being shared without context. The full video, which is from September 2020 shows CM Yogi Adityanath reprimanding officials and the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for not answering or returning phone calls, after fellow party members Arun Pathak and Abhijeet Sanga complained of the same.

CLAIM

The short clip is being shared to claim that Yogi Adityanath was complaining about officials not answering his phone calls. Users are linking the video to the 2022 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, making light of the Chief Minister's statement.

This post by Facebook user 'Sujata Paul - India First' was viewed over 23 lakh times and was shared by more than 4,300 users at the time of writing this article.

More posts with the same claim on social media can be seen here, here, and here.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

We saw that a logo that read 'R9' was visible on the top right corner of the video.

Taking a cue from this, we used the name and other keywords and came across R9 News' YouTube channel. Here, we used relevant keywords in Hindi and came across a video of CM Yogi Adityanath uploaded on 26 September 2020. The video's title translates to 'Lucknow: CM Yogi reprimands officials for not answering calls'.

The section of this report that was widely shared, starts a minute and fourteen seconds into the video.

In this video, we saw that Yogi Adityanath was speaking about some feedback he received from Kanpur, where politicians and party members such as Arun Pathak and Abhijeet Sanga told him that their calls to the Chief Medical Officer and to other officials had gone unanswered.

He is heard speaking in Hindi, where he calls the matter a "very serious issue". He then directs his officials to get in touch with the concerned authorities and ensure that they apologise to Mr Pathak and Mr Sanga.

"Such behaviour of not answering and returning calls will not be tolerated. This is wrong. There is basic etiquette that we take calls, and if we cannot do so because of being busy, we call back and inform them," he said.

We also came across a Dainik Jagran report dated 24 September 2020, which discussed the same issue. It noted that should there be any complaints against an authority in this regard, strict action would be taken against them.

Clearly, a clipped video of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath reprimanding the CMO and his officials for not answering calls from legislators is being shared to falsely claim that government officials in UP had stopped taking his calls.

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