Social media is flooded with a claim that Congress MP and former Congress President Rahul Gandhi has tweeted that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is working towards making the country a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ by passing the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB), and our ancestors’ agenda was always an ‘Islamic country’. This post is shared by several netizens and is spread widely on Facebook. The same tweet was aired on ABP news. As per the viral claim, the tweet by Congress President, that the BJP is following the agenda of Hindu Rashtra by passing the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. “The agenda of our ancestors has always been an Islamic country which is why we created two Islamic countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh. We can’t witness India becoming a Hindu Rashtra.”
The screenshot of the tweet is shared with several captions, the first claims, “Even after seeing this tweet of Pappu aired on ABP News TV channel, those who choose to support the Congress party will not only betray their country but also their religion.”
The second claim reads, “Rahul Gandhi has tweeted this just now from Wayanad, all members of this group must read this.”
For checking the accuracy of the claim, a search on the YouTube channel of ABP News Hindi using the keyword ‘Rahul Gandhi tweet’ was done. Any video related to the viral claim was not found but, a news bulletin uploaded on 10th December 2019 on ABP News Hindi related to anti-CAA surfaced. In the caption of the bulletin, it is written that how Rahul Gandhi took a dig at the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) – now the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019, which was implemented by the Central Government on 10 January 2020.
After this, the viral screenshot and the bulletin from the ABP News Hindi were compared and a few dissimilarities were found, which made it easier to confirm that the viral image is fake. The font in the viral image is completely different from the font used in the genuine graphic plate. In addition to this, the shade of red used in the logo as well as around the borders is darker in the viral image. In the viral image, there is no shadow behind the file image of Rahul Gandhi. In fact, there appears to be a blur. This suggests that a genuine graphic could have been overlaid with the file image. The alleged screenshot of the ABP news bulletin has many grammatical mistakes apart from no punctuation in the entire text. On 10 December 2019, the Congress leader tweeted that the CAB was an “attack on the Indian Constitution”. Apart from this, the recent bulletin of ABP News Hindi is of July 2. These bulletins were on Rahul Gandhi’s tweet. Thus, it can be seen that the current format of the bulletin in ABP news is different from the format seen in the viral screenshot.
Hence, it is clear that a morphed image and claim is used to subdue the original screenshot of the bulletin from ABP news. And, it is also being falsely claimed that Rahul Gandhi has tweeted saying that his ancestors wanted India to be an Islamic country.
