Lighthouse Journalism came across a video being widely shared on social media platforms. The nine-second video was accompanied by a claim stating AAP leader had in the past said Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar was drunk while writing the constitution. The social media users also demanded that he should be arrested for saying this.
During the investigation, we found that the viral video is clipped, and Arvind Kejriwal was talking about the constitution of the Congress party in the viral video and not about the Indian Constitution. The viral clip is edited and the claim is false.
Claim:
X user Vibhor Anand shared the video with the viral claim on his profile.
Other users too are sharing the same clip.
Investigation:
We started our investigation by checking the comment section of the video and there we found the video in color instead of black and white visuals. We ran a reverse image search on these visuals. Also, we spotted some AAP caps on the bottom of the video, which prompted that Kejriwal must have been giving a speech standing on the podium out in the open.
This video in the comment section was 22 seconds long. In this longer version, Arvind Kejriwal was heard talking about the party constitution of Congress.
We then started searching for the same video on the internet.
This led us to another video titled: कांग्रेस का संविधान क्या कहता है? However, the video was uploaded on 23rd December suggesting it was added recently.
We then checked the YouTube channel of Aam Aadmi Party and applied the filter to ‘oldest’ in the videos section. We then checked visually similar videos one after the other.
This led us to a video uploaded on the channel 12 years ago.
At around 4 minutes, Arvind Kejriwal starts talking about the constitution of Aam Aadmi Party. He then says it is unique and declares a new party website and urges people to read constitution that will be uploaded on the website. He later says, the constitution of other parties is fake and goes on to give an example of Congress. And at around 4 min 40 seconds he says, “Constitution of Congress party says no worker shall consume liquor. Someone amongst us said, the one who wrote the Constitution must have been drunk while writing it.”
Conclusion: Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal did not say, Dr BR Ambedkar wrote the Constitution while he was drunk. An old, clipped video of him talking about the constitution of the Congress party has gone viral with false claims. The viral video is clipped and the claim is false.
