The official X handle of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Delhi unit and BJP spokesperson Anuja Kapur have shared a 40-second clip of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader and Delhi cabinet minister Saurabh Bharadwaj to claim that Apple’s digital assistant Siri embarrassed him by taking Delhi’s former Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s name while responding to a question on cleaning of the Yamuna River.
Claim:
The video, which is from the party’s manifesto launch event in Delhi, shows Bharadwaj discussing how Siri uses ChatGPT to answer questions truthfully. He is then seen asking Siri, “Who used the word agar main Yamuna saaf nahi kar paaya to mujhe vote mat dena (If I cannot get the Yamuna cleaned, do not vote for me).” Siri seemingly responds by taking Arvind Kejriwal’s name.
Several social media users shared this clip to claim that Siri had “revealed the truth” and “exposed the fraud.” An archived version of one such post can be found here.
However, we found that this video is edited. In the original speech, Bharadwaj asked Siri a different question. He did not mention the Yamuna River in his exchange with the iOS digital assistant.
Investigation:
A reverse image search of keyframes from the video led us to the original video shared by AAP on their YouTube account (archived here) on January 27, 2025. The video is from the manifesto launch event ahead of the Assembly elections in the national capital on February 5.
In this video, we found the segment used in the viral posts starting at the one minute 32 second timestamp.
Here, a male voice asks Siri, “Who used the word guarantee in Indian politics for the first time? Please use ChatGPT while you answer.” Siri responds to this question by saying, “The term guarantee was first prominently used in Indian politics by the Aam Aadmi Party, AAP, during the 2020 Delhi Assembly elections. Journalist Rajdeep Sardesai noted that AAP’s use of ‘guarantee’ in their campaign was a pioneering move, which was later adopted by other parties in subsequent elections.”
Bharadwaj then replays the same clip for the audience, eliciting applause from the crowd. He then emphasizes that AAP first used the term, after which other political parties had “stolen” it from them. He then invites Kejriwal to the dais, calling him the person who gave the word “guarantee” to Indian politics and much more.
There was no mention of the Yamuna River or its cleaning in this interaction between Bharadwaj and Apple’s digital assistant.
In the run-up to the elections, the promised Yamuna River cleanup issue took center stage after Kejriwal pushed back the completion deadline to 2025, if he were to be elected. Recently, a controversy broke out after the AAP supremo alleged that the BJP-led government of Haryana “mixed poison” in the Yamuna water supplied to Delhi. In response, Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini reportedly took a sip of the water from Yamuna. Haryana government has also filed an FIR against Kejriwal.
Conclusion: The viral video has been digitally edited to make it seem like Siri named AAP and “exposed” them over their failed attempts to clean the Yamuna River in Delhi. However, no such question was asked in the interaction between the digital assistant and AAP leader Bharadwaj.
The fact-check story ws originally published by Logically Facts and has been republished by Lighthouse Journalism as a part of Shakti Collective.
