The person standing beside Prime Minister Narendra Modi in this photo from 1993 is not Amit Shah - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
January 6, 2023
An image is being widely shared on social media, claiming it as a ‘rare pic’ of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah from 1993. Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: A rare old of photo of Amit Shah and Narendra Modi.
Fact: This picture was taken during the PM’s visit to Germany in 1993. The person standing to his right in the photo is not Amit Shah but a person known as Sanjiv Oza. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
Reverse image search on this image led to quite a few articles from May 2022 that contained the same image.
Reportedly, this image was captured in 1993 during Modi’s visit to Germany. A news report by Hindustan Times mentions the person standing beside him as one of his colleagues but does not specify his name. ANI also published a news report on this photo which can read be here.
We also found some tweets with this photo during the reverse image search. Under one such tweet, we found a response from a user who mentioned that the person standing next to Modi is not Amit shah but a person named Dr Sanjivbhai Ojha from Rajkot.
Reportedly Not Amit Shah, he is Dr Sanjivbhai Ojha from Rajkot. Who is said to be current or former Sanjhchalak of Rajkot vibhag of RSS
With this evidence, we looked for the social media profiles of Mr Sanjiv and found his Facebook profile named Sanjiv Oza. In the about section of his profile, he mentioned that he works at RSS. Based on one of his old pictures available on his profile, he looks very similar to the person in the Viral photo. Mr Oza confirmed to BoomLive that he was the one in that picture standing beside Narendra Modi.
To sum up, the person standing beside Prime Minister Narendra Modi in this photo from 1993 is not Amit Shah.