A video of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, where he can be seen being felicitated with garlands at a public gathering is being shared on social media. Those sharing have claimed that he "refuses to accept idol of Bhagwan Vitthal"
Who shared it?: Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) Head of IT Cell, Amit Malviya shared this video on his official X account.
Similarly, BJP Maharashtra X handle also shared this video.
This post recorded 445.7K views at the time of writing this story. (Archives of similar claims can be found here, here and here.)
Is this true?: No, the claim is false as the video is clipped.
In the longer version, he can be seen accepting the idol from the people, which has been edited out from the viral claim.
Rahul Gandhi met farmers in Nashik during the Maharashtra leg of the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra.
How did we find out?: At first, we divided the viral video into multiple keyframes using InVID WeVerify Google Chrome extension and ran a Google reverse image search on some of them.
We came across the longer version of the video on Rahul Gandhi's official YouTube channel.
The video was uploaded on 14 March with the title, "Farmers Meeting | Nashik | Maharashtra | Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra."
We tried to identify the portions in the viral video and found the following:
From 16:39 minutes, the idol can be seen in the frame. Here, Gandhi can be seen felicitated by the party's workers present at the Nashik rally.
At 17:11 minutes, we can see a similar frame as the viral video. The person with the idol can be seen moving closer to Rahul to give him the statue.
The viral video has cut the clip here and not taken any further frames of the video.
At 17:28 minutes of the full version, Rahul can be seen accepting the idol from the people and not rejecting it, as claimed in the viral post.
We also came across a post by Maharastra Pradesh Congress Committee President Nana Patole on X, where he reshared Maharashtra BJP's post.
Patole wrote that the BJP uses religion and God to promote differences and divide the society.
He added that BJP's IT cell uses wrong means to spread hate in the society.
Conclusion: Clearly, a cropped video of Rahul Gandhi is being shared to falsely claim that he did not accept Lord Vitthal's statue.
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