A video clip featuring the congress leader, Rahul Gandhi, has recently gone viral on social media. In this snippet, Gandhi appears to carry out a confusing speech. In the video, he can be seen speaking about his father’s killers and saying that he does not have hatred against them, but in the hospital, he felt like “if something like this happens to me, I would have killed.” It is being argued on social media that one might need seven days to decipher what he’s trying to convey. This article aims to fact-check this claim.
Claim: Rahul Gandhi gave a nonsensical speech about his fathers killers, which could take up to seven days to decipher.
Fact: A small portion of an original 30-minute speech given by Rahul Gandhi at a book launch in New Delhi is being shared out of context to give an impression that he was speaking nonsensically. The speech was delivered coherently where he was not talking about his father’s killers but about an incident in which he met a dalit man who attempted suicide after seeing a video of a few dalit men in Una getiing beaten. Rahul gandhi siad in the video that when he met the man in the hospital, he felt like killing the person who did this to the Dalits instead of attempting suicide. Hence, the claim made in the post is Misleading.
To verify this claim, we dug deeper into the origins of the viral video. Our first step was to identify the event where this speech was given.
A search on the internet with relevant keywords led us to the original full-length version of this video, which is of a book launch event in New Delhi, where Rahul Gandhi was invited to speak. The title of the book is “The Dalit Truth.”
This video was uploaded on the official YouTube channel of Rahul Gandhi. Upon comparing this with the viral video, it is clear that the original speech was selectively clipped and shared out of context to make it sound as if he was making no sense, as he starts off by speaking about his father’s killers and then getting a feeling of killing his assassins when he was in the hospital.
In the almost 30-minute speech (also here and here), he was actually speaking about untouchability. Midway through his speech, he mentions an anecdote of a time when he met one of the fathers of Dalit men who were beaten in Gujarat’s Una in 2016 (here, here).
He said that the father told him that he was happy about this incident because fellow Dalits responded by attempting suicide. Rahul Gandhi then said that he met the men who attempted suicide (here) and who were being treated in a hospital (read here, here).
While describing this meeting, at around 33:39, Rahul says that he thought that “ if I was in his place and was ready to die, before dying, I would have killed the killer of my brother.” This is what he later mentions in the video from 34:48, which is also in the viral clip. He explained that although he did not have any grudge against his father’s killers if he was in the place of the person he met in the hospital, he would have killed the ones who harmed his brother.
Later, he mentions that he told him the same, which is what we see in the viral clip. The viral clip has been cut from the 34:48 timestamp to make it sound like he is talking about his father’s killers, but in reality, when one watches the clip in the context of his speech would understand that he was narrating a story in which he expressed his feeling of anger that he got when he met a Dalit man who attempted suicide after he saw a video of fellow Dalits who were beaten in Una.
To sum up, Rahul Gandhi’s speech at the book launch of “The Dalit Truth” in New Delhi was shared out of context to seem nonsensical.
