The men wearing gold in these images are not Balaji Temple Priests - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
July 9, 2019
On Facebook, a post with a collage of men wearing gold ornaments is being shared with a claim that they are priests in the Balaji Temple. Let’s try to analyze the claim made in the post.
The men wearing gold in the images are priests in the Balaji Temple.
Fact: Two out of five men in the collage turned out to be businessmen. Hence, the claim that the men wearing gold in the images are Balaji Temple priests stands to be FALSE.
When the images in the collage are cropped and are individually subjected to Reverse Image Search technique, no information was found about them. Further research reveals that this kind of news has been in circulation since 2014. In one of the Facebook posts, a user put a comment about the man in the photo-1 of the collage saying that the man belongs to U.P. and he is famous during Kanwar Yatras. With this information, when googled further, no exact photo of the one in the post was found, but it was found that the man in the photo-1 is Sudhir Kumar Bittu, also known as ‘Gold Man’. He is a businessman by profession. When verified if he is a priest at Balaji temple, no supporting information was found.
In the process of our search, when looked on YouTube with the keywords “Gold men in India”, the man in photo-5 (when moved in the clockwise direction) was seen in a video. From the video, it was found that he is Samrat Moze of Pune. When looked for more information about him, it was found that he is a politician from the Nationalist Congress Party. It is clear that he is also not a priest at the Tirupati Balaji temple.
When Factly looked for information regarding the other three photos in the collage, nothing was found about them. But it can be concluded based on available information that the men wearing gold in these images are not Balaji Temple Priests.
Did you watch our new Episode of DECODE series on Parliament?