Ahead of the Maharashtra Assembly elections, Lighthouse Journalism found a widely circulated video featuring former Maharashtra chief minister and Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Uddhav Thackeray. The 45-second video is divided into two segments: in the first, Thackeray appears to admit to eating beef, while the second part shows various individuals sharing their opinions about him. Upon investigation, we found that Thackeray did not make any such admission; the video has been edited to misrepresent his statements.
Claim:
X user Ashish Nazar shared the video with false claim.
Other users too are sharing the same claim.
Investigation:
We started the investigation by checking the keyframes of the video. On the visuals being shared one thing that we could notice beginning was, ‘Dussehra Rally Live’ written over the screen.
Hence, we started searching for Uddhav Thackeray’s Dussehra address.
We found similar visual of his from this year’s Dussehra rally that was streamed two weeks ago from Shivaji Park, Mumbai.
At around 2 hours 7 mins in the speech, he talks about Maharashtra government declaring cow as ‘Rajya Mata’.
After that he talks about gau rakshaks. At 2 hours 8 mins he says, that a boy named Aryan Mishra was murdered in Haryana on the suspicion of him carrying beef. Thackeray alleged that his senseless killing did not make it to news because he was a Hindu and not a Muslim.
Then he talks about Union minister Kiren Rijiju’s old statement of him making an admission, that he eats beef and no one can stop him.
He then alleges, “You kill kids on the suspicion of carrying beef, but who openly accepts eating it, you give him a place in your cabinet.”
This had cleared out the speculation of Uddhav Thackeray admitting that he eats beef.
In 2015 the then minister of state for home affairs Kiren Rijiju described as unpalatable his colleague Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi’s remarks that those who eat beef should go to Pakistan, and questioned whether anyone could stop him from eating beef.
Conclusion: Edited video of Uddhav Thackeray’s speech during Dussehra falsely claims that he accepted eating beef. Viral claim is false.
