A day after the BJP’s two-day national executive meeting concluded in Hyderabad on Sunday with PM Modi addressing a large gathering, a video of men wearing BJP merchandise and distributing alcohol has gone viral on social media with a misleading claim.
Senior lawyer and activist Prashant Bhushan shared the video on his Twitter handle on Monday, which has crossed 3.2K retweets and over 120.9K views.
In his tweet published in Hindi, Bhushan says, “Waah Modi ji, your party has even turned Telangana into Goa! Such fun!”
Fact-Check
In the video, men are seen wearing sweaters and jackets, which is a very unlikely scene in India during the month of July and that too in a city like Hyderabad. As we scanned through the comment section of Bhushan’s tweet we noticed some users replying that the video is an old one and not from Telangana.
“This is not Telangana – entire Telangana no one wears such heavy woollens that too in July of 2022. Please delete the incorrect video,” a user replied.
Another user says, “This is an old video sir…. Please be very careful with these things now a days….”
Taking hints from these replies, we did a Google reverse image search of a keyframe from the video. This led us to several links, including news reports that prove that the incident is not a recent one.
We found that the same video was shared on the official Twitter handle of the Uttar Pradesh Congress on December 20, 2021.
According to this YouTube video published by TEN NEWS on Dec 22, 2021, Youth Congress had accused BJP of serving alcohol during a party rally in Haridwar. “BJP served Alcohol to attract crowd to JP Nadda’s rally in Haridwar, alleges Youth Congress,” TEN NEWS reported.
However, we did not find any report that could provide details of the location and time of the actual incident. But, we can definitely conclude that the video is not from BJP’s national executive meeting in Telangana.
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