A photo is being shared on social media claiming it is a recent picture of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi having a close conversation with a young girl during the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’. Sharing the photo, this post states that noone is going to take Rahul Gandhi’s yatra seriously, when he is busy applying mehndi and playing with children. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: Recent picture of Rahul Gandhi having a close conversation with a young girl during the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’.
Fact: The photo shared in the post shows Rahul Gandhi with his niece Miraya Vadra during a remembrance ceremony for the 71st birth anniversary of the former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, on 20 August 2015. The photo shared in the post is old and has nothing to do with the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’. Hence, the claim made in the post is MISLEADING.
On reverse image search of the photo shared in the post, the same photo was found published on the ‘Getty Images’ website on 20 August 2015. According to the description of the photo, the young girl who is seen with Rahul Gandhi in the photo is Miraya Vadra, daughter of Rahul Gandhi’s sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. The description of the photo states, “Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi with his niece Miraya Vadra during a remembrance ceremony for the 71st birth anniversary of the former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi at Veer Bhumi on August 20, 2015 in New Delhi, India. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated during electoral campaigning, allegedly by Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebel separatists, in the town of Sriperumpudur, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu on May 21, 1991”. The photo was credited to the ‘Hindustan Times’ reporter Sonu Mehta.
A few other pictures of Rahul Gandhi with Miraya Vadra during the remembrance ceremony of Rajiv Gandhi can be seen here and here. Several news websites published these pictures in their articles in 2015. They can be seen here and here.
CTR Nirmal Kumar, the head of BJP Tamil Nadu’s IT & social media unit, recently tweeted this photo with the same description as claimed in the post. Later, CTR Nirmal Kumar deleted his tweet and published another tweet stating, “My intention is never to bring anybody’s personal life to public. My Tamil Tweet about this @RahulGandhi was misunderstood. Though I stand by the contents of the tweet as it was purely a political comment & nothing wrong with it. I’m deleting that tweet!”. From all these pieces of evidence, it can be concluded that the photo shared in the post has nothing to do with the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’, that Congress started from Tamil Nadu’s Kanyakumari, on 07 September 2022.
To sum it up, an old picture of Rahul Gandhi with his niece is shared with a misleading narrative linking it to the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’.
