Amidst the ongoing UP elections, a social media post accompanying the video of a man distributing money to people in presence of Yogi Adityanath is being widely circulated across social media platforms with a claim that ‘Yogi is buying votes with notes’. Through this article, let’s fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Visuals of Yogi Adityanath buying votes by bribing voters with cash.
Fact: The visuals actually show Yogi Adityanath handing over monetary compensation to farmers whose crops were burnt in fire accident back in 2012. Even the conversation in the viral video suggests the same. There are no recent reports of Yogi Adityanath bribing people for votes. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
From the conversation which can be heard from 1:48 to 2:14 timestamp of the video, we can infer that the money was being distributed for some crop damage, as the people involved were talking about sowing crops. The man reading out names can be heard asking whether you people sow at two places to which a beneficiary replies, ‘we had sowed the same at two places.’ At this point, Yogi Adityanath says, ‘it must be his brother’s, call him.’
Further search on the internet yielded a 2019 fact-check article by the Quint, which debunked the same visuals when they went viral ahead of the 2019 LOk Sabha general elections. As per this article, the visuals actually date back to 2012, when Yogi Adityanath was handing over monetary support to the victims of crop damage due to a fire accident.
As per the article, Quint found the video was initially shared on 21 April 2012 on YouTube by Vinay Kumar Gautam. However, the video is currently not available on his YouTube channel. Quint reached out to Vinay, who confirmed that the visuals show Yogi Adityanath handing over monetary compensation to farmers whose crops were burnt when he was MP from Gorakhpur.
Further, there are no recent reports of Yogi Adityanath bribing people for votes. Although we could not independently verify the context of the visuals shown in the video, the available evidence suggest that it is an old video that has nothing to do with the current 2022 elections and that Yogi Adityanath is not bribing people for votes.
To sum it up, an old video of Yogi Adityanath extending monetary support to crop damage victims is passed off as Yogi bribing people for votes.
