Election or no election, discussions over Rahul Gandhi’s caste and religion still hogs the limelight on social media.
On Monday, a Facebook post with a video showing Rahul praying with Muslim clerics went viral. The post claims that soon after the elections, the Congress president turned to Islam leaving his “jenau” behind. India Today Fact Check found that the video in circulation is old and carries a false claim.
The video has a top band in Hindi saying “jenau chorr phir kattar Islam ki sharan”, and the lower band along with the video says “Chunav khatam hote hi asli rang mein aa gaye janaab”.
Wearing a skull cap, Rahul is seen offering prayers in the video along with senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad. An aged Muslim cleric can be heard saying prayers for Rahul. All of them are standing beneath a red canopy.
Watch the video here
The post put up by Facebook page ModiNama was viewed more than 70,000 times and shared nearly 4,000 times at the time of filing this story. Another Facebook page, Argumentative Indian, also posted the same video with the same claim.
Hundreds of comments poured in for the post, mostly slamming Rahul because they believed he had turned to Islam soon after the Assembly elections were over.
India Today looked for videos of Rahul’s visits to various Muslim religious places. With keywords such as “Rahul Gandhi Mazaar” or “Rahul Gandhi dargah”, we finally found a news clip of Sahara Samay on YouTube. The visual, location and people in the news clip match exactly with the viral video.
This news clip was published on September 10, 2016, when Rahul visited Kichaucha Sharif dargah in Ambedkar Nagar district of Uttar Pradesh. The entire news clip can be seen here.
During his Ayodhya visit in 2016, Rahul first visited Hanumangarhi temple and then visited Kichaucha Sharif dargah in Ambedkar Nagar.
According to an AajTak news report, he stayed at the dargah for 30 minutes where Maulana Suhel Asharaf offered special prayers with him for “peace and prosperity of the nation”.
This two-year-old video of Rahul has surfaced again on social media with a completely false claim.
[“source=gsmarena”]
