On 9 August 2022, JD(U) leader Nitish Kumar resigned as chief minister of Bihar and ended his party’s alliance with the BJP, announcing that his party had re-joined the Mahagathbandhan. He again took oath as Chief Minister of Bihar for the eighth time on 10 August 2022, this time backed by RJD and other opposition parties including the Congress & Communist parties. Against this backdrop, an image of Nitish Kumar’s Poster is being widely shared on social media. The poster contains the picture of Nitish Kumar along with the line ‘नीतीश सबके है’ (Nitish belongs to all). The post says that Nitish Kumar joins hands with any party that fulfills his ambitions. Several media outlets claim this as a recent poster (here, here, and here). Let’s fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: A poster saying ‘Nitish sabke hai’ (Nitish belongs to all) was put up after Nitish Kumar’s resignation on 09 August 2022 & the termination of his party’s ties with the BJP.
Fact: This poster was installed around October 2020 outside the JD(U) head office in Patna. Also, the same photo was shared by several social media users in October 2020. Hence the claim made in the post is MISLEADING.
We did a reverse image search of the viral picture and found a Facebook post from 08 October 2020 sharing the same poster.
Taking a cue from this, we searched for a more credible sources and found a tweet made by Chitra Tripathi, Editor and Anchor of Aajtak, on 06 October 2020 which contains the same image of Nitish Kumar’s poster.
By comparing the two images, it is evident that the image shared in the post is the same as the viral image.
Upon further investigation, we found that the same image was used by BBC Marathi in a November 2020 article. According to the article, JD(U) used the slogan of ‘Nitish sabke hai’ in the 2020 elections.
ABP Bihar Uploaded a video on its official YouTube channel on 02 October 2020 regarding the posters outside JD(U) head office in Patna. This video also shows the visuals of the ‘नितीश सबके हैं’ (‘Nitish sabke hai’) poster. Though we couldn’t find out the exact date of the poster’s installation, it can be concluded that it is not placed after Nitish’s resignation this year in 2022.
To sum it up, the poster ‘Nitish sabke hai’ is not a recent one. It is a poster from October 2020 or earlier.
