Lighthouse Journalism found a video being shared on social networking platforms, with the claim that the person seen speaking against the Congress party was a Congress MLA himself, named Anil Upadhyay. In the video he was seen blaming Congress party and its leaders for riots. During the investigation we found the video to be old and that the person speaking in the video is not a Congress leader or an MLA.
Claim:
X user @Verma18311652 shared the video on his handle with a misleading claim.
Other users too are sharing the video with similar claims.
Investigation:
We obtained screenshots of the video and found a watermark on it, ‘The Newspaper Exclusive’.
We did find a YouTube account by the name, ‘The Newspaper‘.
On checking the oldest videos on the channel we found the viral video on the channel. This video was around 11 min long as compared to the 2 min viral clip.
The video was titled: Rahul Gandhi पर प्रोफेसर ने ऐसा क्या कहा कि लोगों ने गोद में उठा लिया | Delhi
Translation: What did this professor say about Rahul Gandhi, that people picked him up | Delhi
The video was uploaded on March 5, 2020. Nowhere in the video was it mentioned that the person speaking in the video was a member of Congress Party.
We then moved our search to check if there was any Congress MLA by the name Anil Upadhyay. We checked for details about the same on myneta.info.
We found that there was no Anil Upadhyay who was MLA from Indian National Congress. Instead we found a candidate named Anil Upadhyay who was an Independent (IND) candidate from Kurukshetra.
Conclusion: The person seen in the viral video criticizing Congress is not a Congress leader or an MLA. A 2020 video is being shared with misleading claims.
