A video of the senior congress leader and former Chief Minister of Uttarakhand Harish Rawat is being shared on social media (here, here, and here) claiming that he converted to Islam. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: Senior congress leader and former Chief Minister of Uttarakhand Harish Rawat converted to Islam.
Fact: The viral video was originally published in November 2021 and shows Harish Rawat attending Piran Kaliyar, where he offered a chadar at Sabir Pak’s shrine ahead of the 2022 Uttarakhand assembly elections. There are no credible reports suggesting that Harish Rawat converted to Islam. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
A relevant keyword search related to the viral claim did not yield any credible information that the former Chief Minister of Uttarakhand, Harish Rawat has converted to Islam.
On conducting a reverse image search on keyframes from the viral video, we discovered that the longer version was published by the News18 Uttarakhand channel on its official Facebook page on 28 November 2021. The video describes the video as “Former CM Harish Rawat offered prayers for peace by offering chadar at Sabir Pak’s dargah in Piran Kaliyar. During this, he said that Congress will win the assembly elections with a huge margin.”
Further research revealed media reports (here and here) covering this news. According to these reports, Harish Rawat visited Sabir Pak’s dargah in Piran Kaliyar, Roorkee, ahead of the 2022 Uttarakhand assembly elections. None of these reports suggested that Rawat converted to Islam.
We also found several instances of him visiting the dargah (here and here) and other Places of worship (here and here).
To sum up, an old video of former Uttarakhand Chief Minister Harish Rawat visiting a dargah is being circulated with the false claim that he converted to Islam.
