A viral photo of former India cricket team captain, MS Dhoni, visiting a Gurdwara (Sikh temple) has lately been the talk of social media. The image has been shared widely, with the claim that it was taken during the ongoing farmers’ protest. Some netizens have even praised him for his spine to skip the Ram Mandir Pran Pratishtha in January 2024 but choose to visit a Gurdwara amid the farmers’ protest. Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: The photo depicts MS Dhoni visiting a Gurdwara during the current farmers’ protest.
Fact: This photo is from 2022, captured during Dhoni’s visit to a Gurdwara in London. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To verify this claim, we first performed a reverse image search on the viral photo. We discovered this photo on the Twitter handle of a user named Gurpreet Singh Anand, who posted it on 26 February 2024. His caption read, ‘Mahendra Singh Dhoni at the @khalsajatha.’
A few users in the comment section pointed out that the photo is old, possibly dating back to 2022. Following these leads, we went through Anand’s other social media profiles and found a cropped version of the same photo he uploaded on Instagram on 17 July 2022. His caption there read, ‘Bowled over with the legendary @mahi7781.’
From this, it is clear that the photo in question is from 2022 and unrelated to the farmers’ protest that began on 13 February 2024 (here and here).
We also found several news reports (here and here) in 2022 stating that Dhoni was in London around the same time. NDTV Sports reported that he was seen strolling in London, accompanied by his bodyguards, which further corroborates the actual timeline of the photo.
To sum up, the viral photo of MS Dhoni at a Gurudwara is from 2022, during his visit to London, not during the current farmers’ protest of 2024 as claimed.
