INDIA: One of the ruling BJP government’s most vocal and predominant opponents is the historic Congress party, whose controversial figure, Rahul Gandhi, recently launched an anti-BJP mission called the Bharat Jodo Yatra in Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu.
The movement has been paraded through six states, and now the yatra is in Maharashtra as its neighbour Gujarat holds its elections in full swing.
A video has recently surfaced online and gone viral among Indian netizens. The 15-second-long video clip shows Rahul Gandhi at a Congress rally, saying: “I want power. I don’t care about the truth. The truth can go to hell. I just want the seat.”
Many social media netizens have widely circulated this video clip with captions written in Hindi, mocking Gandhi for his bold and expressive acts of megalomania. One Twitter user wrote: “Rahul Ji only wants power. He doesn’t care about the truth.”
Our fact-checking team took a keen interest in this trending video and unearthed the actual truth behind it. We discovered that in the original video, Gandhi was actually referring to its archnemesis and ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, and not himself.
A reverse search of the keyframes from the viral video clip led us to the original video that was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of The Indian Express, which is titled “Rahul Gandhi Slams BJP: ‘I Am a Hindu, Not Hindutvawadi.”
The video clip is actually from a Congress rally called “Mehangai Hatao Maha Rally” (Eradicate Inflation Rally), organised in Rajasthan’s Jaipur on December 13, 2021.
A longer version of the video was also available on the Congress’s official YouTube channel. That video was titled, “Shri Rahul Gandhi addresses the ‘Mehengai Hatao Maha Rally’ in Jaipur, Rajasthan.”
In the latter seconds of the video, Gandhi can be heard saying in Hindi, “Hindutwavadis want power at any cost. Just like Mahatma Gandhi once said, ‘I want the truth. I look for the truth. I don’t want power’, the same way, they (the BJP) say, ‘I want power. I don’t care about the truth. The truth can go to hell. I just want the seat’.”
The rally and Gandhi’s speech became widely shared, but the video footage was clearly distorted in later clips, which gained immense traction on Twitter for showcasing Gandhi’s desire for political power instead of truth.
Thus, it is clear that in the viral clip, Gandhi was not talking about himself, but rather he was targeting Bharatiya Janata Party leaders.
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