Following the photographs of the 2024 T20 World Cup winning team’s meeting with PM Modi, social media is abuzz with posts (here, here, and here) about the 2007 T20 World Cup winning team’s meeting with Congress leader Sonia Gandhi. It is being claimed that Captain M S Dhoni and his team met Sonia instead of Manmohan Singh, the then PM of India. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: The 2007 T20 World Cup winning Indian team met Sonia Gandhi and did not meet the then-PM Manmohan Singh.
Fact: Dhoni and his teammates did meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2007 after they won the 2007 T20 World Cup. Hence, the claim made in the post is Misleading.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we searched for news reports on the 2007 T20 World Cup winning team’s meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. This search led us to news reports from 2007 published by the Times of India titled ‘T20 team meets PM’ and ‘PM felicitates Twenty20 World Cup winning team.’
A further search led us to photos of this interaction on the former PM Manmohan Singh’s website. This evidence confirms that the 2007 T20 World Cup winning team met PM Manmohan Singh in 2007, which contradicts the viral claim. As per these reports, Manmohan Singh met India’s team at his residence in New Delhi.
You can find the same photos from 2007 on PIB( here and here) and Getty Images.
To sum up, the 2007 T20 World Cup winning team had also met the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
