A post (here and here) viral on social media claims that the Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Azam Khan allegedly made a remark that ‘Hindu leaders may wear the Muslim cap any number of times, but we Muslim leaders will not wear the tilak. No matter how much Hindus respect namaz, we Muslims will definitely boycott Vande Mataram. Because both secularism and patriotism are forbidden in Islam.’ We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Azam Khan said that Muslims will boycott Vande Mataram as Secularism and Patriotism are forbidden in Islam.
Fact: The statement has been circulating online since 2013. Azam Khan had filed written complaints with the police the multiple items about this. He denied making this remark and clarified that such a statement was being falsely attributed to him. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To verify the claim, we conducted an internet search using relevant keywords to check whether Azam Khan had made such statements. However, we did not find any credible news reports supporting this claim. During the search, we found that the same claim has been circulating on social media since at least 2013 (here, here, and here). You can find the archive links to these posts here, here, and here. Azam Khan had denied making these statements and had lodged a complaint with the police against the posts attributing these remarks to him.
A keyword search related to this led us to news reports (here, here, here, and here) from 2013, which stated that Azam Khan had written a letter to the Director General of Police (DGP) of Lucknow seeking action regarding the post, which is identical to the one now being circulated on social media.
According to these reports, he told the media that he was not even aware that such a message was circulating on social media until his friend shared the information with him. The viral post was made on a ‘fake profile’ of Azam Khan, as per these reports.
‘‘Azam had informed the Lucknow police through a letter on October 18 last year about his fake Facebook profile, but to no effect. When the complaints of a senior minister are treated in such a manner, I can very well understand why common people are losing faith in the police, he said.’’ as reported by The India Express in June 2013. According to that report, he denied any role of his partymen in that Facebook post.
Furthermore, we found a few news reports (here, here, here, and here) from March 2015, according to which a teenager in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, was arrested for uploading an objectionable post against Azam Khan.
This post contained the same content that is being attributed to him in the viral post. In a news report published on this incident by Times Now, a police officer can be seen saying that the statement/remarks in the post were not made by him.
To sum up, an old fake quote linked to SP leader Azam Khan has resurfaced online after a decade.
