Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi before filing his nomination for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. A video depicting Modi’s prayer with Yogi Adityanath seated behind him has been widely shared. The video shows Adityanath’s face blurred, leading to speculation that it was intentionally blurred to highlight Modi (here & here). This article aims to fact-check this claim.
Claim: A video showing Modi’s visit to the Kashi Vishwanath temple with Yogi Adityanath’s face blurred.
Fact: The media agency responsible for reporting the viral video blurred the logo of the agency from which the video was sourced. However, inadvertently, in a few frames, the blurred section overlapped with Yogi’s face. This led to a misunderstanding, as it appeared that Yogi’s face was intentionally blurred. In the original video, Yogi Adityanath’s face was not blurred. Hence, the claim made in the post is MISLEADING.
The viral video depicts Prime Minister Modi’s visit to the Kashi Vishwanath temple alongside Yogi Adityanath. However, most news agencies have aired the visit with Yogi’s face clearly visible, contrary to what the viral video suggests.
A Google search using relevant keywords provided us with several reports detailing Modi’s visit to the Kashi Vishwanath temple, a day before filing his nomination from the Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency. However, in all of these reports, Yogi Adityanath’s face is clearly visible without any blurring (here & here). Adityanath was observed seated behind Modi while the latter offered prayers.
Upon noticing that the viral video bears the ‘Hindi Khabar’ logo, we conducted a search on their social media profiles. This led us to their Twitter post, wherein they issued a clarification regarding the viral claim. As the video was shared with similar allegations by a Congress leader, Hindi Khabar responded by stating that the viral clip features the ANI logo, and it was this logo that was blurred by a trainee journalist, not Yogi’s face. They provided several screenshots from their broadcast where Yogi’s face is clearly visible, highlighting that only the ANI logo was blurred.
To gain additional insight, we reviewed the YouTube channel of ‘Hindi Khabar’ and observed that in several of their videos, the area behind their logo is blurred (here, here & here). This likely indicates that the logo is of the agency from which they obtained the video. Additionally, we noticed a similar blur at the top right corner in the video of Modi and Yogi’s roadshow in Varanasi featured on their channel. This implies that the media agency responsible for the viral video had blurred the top right corner of the frame, and Yogi’s face unintentionally overlapped with this area, rather than it being a deliberate act.
To sum up, Yogi Adityanath’s face was not intentionally blurred in this video to highlight Modi.
