A photo is being shared on social media claiming it is a recent picture of a Muslim man sitting on a Mahatma Gandhi statue in Rajasthan. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: Photo of a Muslim man sitting on a Mahatma Gandhi statue in Rajasthan.
Fact: This photo was taken in 2017 during the Bharat Milaap celebrations at Gandhi chowk in Amethi, Uttar Pradesh. The photo shared in the post is old and has nothing to do with Rajasthan. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
On reverse image search of the photo shared in the post, a similar photo was found shared by a few social media users in 2017. They can be seen here and here. A Facebook user shared the photo mentioning it as a picture taken during the Bharat Milaap celebrations at Gandhi chowk in Amethi, Uttar Pradesh. Another Facebook shared a couple of similar photos with the same description.
A few pictures and a video showing the visuals of the Mahatma Gandhi statue in Amethi’s Gandhi Chowk can be seen here and here. The ‘Vishwas News’ fact-check team contacted Dainik Jagran’s Amethi reporter Dilip Singh for more clarification regarding the photo. Speaking to the ‘Vishwas News’, Dilip Singh said, “This picture was taken during Bharat Milaap at Gandhi Chowk in Amethi. When a lot of crowd was present there, one person from the crowd sat on Mahatma Gandhi’s statue. There is no communal angle in the viral picture”.
To sum it up, an old photo from Uttar Pradesh is shared with a communal narrative that a Muslim man is sitting on a Mahatma Gandhi statue in Rajasthan.
