A short clip of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi speaking at a public event is being shared out of context on social media. The clip, in which Gandhi can be heard saying that there's no other idiot like him in the country, was shared on Twitter, with users exclaiming that Rahul Gandhi had finally "realised the truth".
The Quint found that the viral video was edited from a longer speech in 2018, when Rahul Gandhi addressed an Other Backward Classes (OBC) convention in New Delhi's Talkatora stadium. In the address, he spoke about how a few OBC MPs from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came up to him and said what is being shared as the claim.
CLAIM
The clip was shared to mock Rahul Gandhi, where users celebrated that he underwent self-realisation. Calling him 'Pappu', some also wondered why the Congress leader says that he brought incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power.
An archived version of this claim can be seen here.
(Source: Twiiter/Screenshot)
The video is being shared since 2018 and different claims on Twitter can be seen here, here and here.
The Quint received a query on the claim being made about the video on its WhatsApp tipline as well.
WHAT WE FOUND
We used InVID to divide the video into multiple keyframes and ran a reverse image search on them that led us to a video uploaded on YouTube on 14 June 2018, titled 'Truth behind Rahul Gandhi's statement "Mere jaisa bewakoof".'
YouTube user Neel Kaushik uploaded a longer version of the clip.
(Photo: YouTube/Altered by The Quint)
The video was geo-tagged to be from Talkatora Stadium, New Delhi.
Taking a cue from here, we searched on Google using keywords 'Rahul Gandhi Talkatora Stadium' and found the full speech uploaded on Rahul Gandhi's verified YouTube channel.
The viral portion can be heard from the 15:47-minute mark in the nearly 25-minute-long video wherein he addressed an Other Backward Classes (OBC) conference.
"In Lok Sabha, Narendra Modi's OBC MPs came to me... One of them held my hand and said 'Rahul ji, there is no other fool like me in this country. I brought him, I made him Prime Minister and today, I, a Lok Sabha MP, cannot say a word in front of him. I am not alone, they are scared but they also have the same thing in their hearts.'"Rahul Gandhi at the AICC OBC conference in New Delhi
He goes on to say how the MP told him that despite being a parliamentarian, PM Modi "didn't let them speak" and that nobody was listening to them, but that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was always being heard.
A report by The Week, which carries a photo of the event, noted that BJP MPs belonging to OBC community had spoken to the Congress leader in the Parliament.
Further, the portion relevant to the viral video can be heard from 04:51 minutes in the YouTube video uploaded by The Quint in 2018.
Clearly, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi did not call himself a fool. The clip, which is being shared out of context, was clipped from a longer version of his address at an OBC convention in New Delhi in 2018.
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