No Evidence to conclude that Chinese President Xi Jinping thanked Rahul Gandhi for starting his Bharat Jodo Yatra 2.0 from Manipur. - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
January 17, 2024
As Rahul Gandhi’s sequel to his Bharat Jodo Yatra, Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra was flagged off recently from Manipur, a screenshot of a purported tweet by a Chinese media outlet is doing the rounds on social media. The tweet says that Chinese Premier Xi Jinping thanked Rahul Gandhi for commencing his Yatra from Manipur, not from Arunachal Pradesh. This article aims to fact-check this claim.
Claim: Screenshot of a tweet by Global Times news that mentions Chinese President Xi Jinping thanked Rahul Gandhi for not starting his Yatra from ‘Indian-occupied’ Arunachal Pradesh and instead doing it from Manipur.
Fact: Global Times has not posted any such news on their ‘X’ handle. Also, none of the mainstream media outlets reported about any such statement by Xi Jinping thanking Rahul Gandhi for starting from Manipur. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
Firstly, to check the veracity of the viral claim, we carefully went through the tweets posted by Global Times news on their official ‘X’ handle. But, contrary to the viral screenshot, which says that they made this post on 14 January 2024, we did not find any such tweet on that day.
Further, an advanced search on X and Google has also not resulted in any credible information which proves that the Global Times, a Chinese media outlet, has reported it.
Subsequently, we performed a reverse image search on the viral screenshot’s video portion to know its context. This search led us to a video from March 2018 which contained visuals that matched the viral screenshot. This video was filmed during the first session of the 13th National People’s Congress on 7 March 2018 (here and here).  Clearly, on that day, he could not have spoken about Rahul’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra, which started in 2024. Also, the viral screenshot looks cropped and edited.
Furthermore, if the Chinese President makes such a statement about Rahul Gandhi, mainstream media outlets would definitely report on it. But a keyword search on the internet yielded no credible news reports to back the viral claim either. Xi Jinping made no statements about Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra either in the past or recently. Hence, it can be concluded that the viral screenshot is just an edited graphic.
To sum up, Chinese President Xi Jinping has not thanked Rahul Gandhi for starting his Bharat Jodo Yatra 2.0 from Manipur, the viral screenshot is a digital creation.