A photo of Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav and his wife Dimple Yadav at a grave is going viral on social media with the claim that they were seen paying their respects to the gangster and politician Atiq Ahmed. Let’s verify this claim through this fact-check article.
Claim: The photo shows Akhilesh Yadav and his wife paying respects at Atiq Ahmed’s grave.
Fact: This is a photo from 2022 captured during Akhilesh and Dimple Yadav’s vist to the grave of Mulayam Singh Yadav. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To validate the claim associated with the viral photo, we performed a reverse image search. This process led us to the same photo, tweeted as a part of a series by Akhilesh Yadav on his official verified Twitter account in November 2022.
The tweets indicated that Akhilesh and his wife, Dimple Yadav, visited the burial place of Mulayam Singh Yadav before filing nomination papers for contesting in the Mainpuri Lok Sabha by-poll (here and here).
Additionally, Dimple Yadav posted the same photo on her ‘X’ account, confirming the visit to Mulayam Singh Yadav’s memorial site. This evidence clearly refutes the claim that the photo was taken at Atiq Ahmed’s burial site.
To sum up, the viral photo of Akhilesh and Dimple Yadav was taken at the grave of Mulayam Singh Yadav, not Atiq Ahmed.
