A video showing Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath lashing out at a camera person from news wire ANI (Asian News International) has gone viral with claims that the chief minister was caught on camera using an expletive. The viral clip shows the chief minister giving a sound byte to an ANI journalist after the former received his first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine COVAXIN on Monday morning. In the video, Adityanath thanks the country’s scientists before getting distracted by a disturbance in the background. The UP chief minister then lowers his voice and can be heard allegedly saying, “kya karte ho ch*tiyapane ka…” with the words trailing off.
Aam Aadmi Party tweeted the video from its official Twitter handle with a caption, “WARNING: Fake Yogi’s non-sanskari language ahead.”
Srinivas B V, the National President of the Indian Youth Congress, shared the video with a caption, “You might feel ashamed of this video: See in these 8 minutes how much Ajay Bisht respects journalism”.
After the outrage over the video, Shalabh Mani Tripathi, Yogi Adityanath’s media advisor, tweeted, claiming the video to be edited. He shared a fact check done by a site Breaking Tube and said, “In fact-check, it is found that the video of CM Yogi is edited, words are added in last 3 seconds of video.” He retweeted multiple versions of such “fact-checks”, though he himself didn’t comment on the matter.
Speaking to news website Newslaundry, UP’s additional chief secretary of information also claimed that the video seemed to be “morphed”. However, there is enough visual evidence to suggest that the first video had not been tampered with in anyway. However, the video, which was first tweeted by ANI and later retracted, was neither fake nor edited. The same footage was aired by a few TV channels. However, those clips, barring a few, have also been taken down.
