That’s Not Assam CM Comparing Modi, Shah to Sholay’s Characters

The video shows professional speaker Gaurav Pradhan, who was speaking at an event in Maharashtra in April this year.

A short video of a man discussing India's political situation and drawing comparisons with a 1975 film, Sholay is being shared across social media. Users claim that it shows the chief minister of Assam comparing characters from the film to politicians such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah.

We found that the video shows professional speaker Gaurav Pradhan, who was speaking at an event called Samarth Bharat Manch in Nashik, Maharashtra in April this year.

CLAIM

The video is being shared with a Hindi claim: "आसाम के मुख्यमंत्री का सबसे छोटा भाषण जिसमे की उन्होंने सब कुछ कह दिया। समझिये उनको अगर आपमें समझ है तो।"

[Translation: The shortest speech by the chief minister of Assam where he said everything. Understand him if you can.]

More such claims on Facebook and Twitter can be found here, here, here and here.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

Using InVID, a video verification tool, we segmented the video into several keyframes and ran a reverse image search on each of them. This led us to a tweet from 3 May that carried the longer version of the viral video and identified the speaker as one Gaurav Pradhan.

We then found a video uploaded on Gaurav Pradhan's YouTube channel on 12 April, titled: ‘समर्थ भारत मंच द्वारा नासिक में आयोजित बदलते भारत्त में हिंदुत्व का बढ़ता दाइत्व’ (Growing responsibility of Hindutva in changing India organised by Samarth Bharat Manch in Nashik).

The YouTube video, which is nearly 1 hour and 36 minutes-long, showed Pradhan speaking on Hindutva. The portion seen in the viral video can be heard from 9:40 minutes in the YouTube one, where Pradhan asked the audience whether they watched the 1975 film.

He spoke about a scene in the film Sholay, where the villagers discussed removing protagonists Jai and Veeru, who had come there to protect them from the antagonist, Gabbar Singh. Pradhan said in Hindi, "This is what the situation in India is like. People want to remove Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, regardless of what is happening."

Further, there is a stark difference in the appearance of Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and professional speaker Gaurav Pradhan.

Clearly, the video does not show chief minister of Assam delivering a speech about Hindutva and comparing political situations to a film.

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