This photo of PM Modi staring inappropriately at Rihanna is morphed - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
June 22, 2023
A photo of PM Narendra Modi that shows him staring inappropriately at singer Rihanna is viral on social media. Let’s find out the facts behind this photo through this article.
Claim: Photo of PM Narendra Modi inappropriately staring at singer Rihanna.
Fact: This is a morphed photo. The picture of Rihanna is from 2017, when she received the Harvard University Humanitarian of the Year award. Narendra Modi was not present at that event. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
Performing a reverse image search by cropping Rihanna’s portion of this picture led us to a few news articles from 2017 (here and here), revealing that this picture was taken when she was presented with Harvard University’s Humanitarian of the Year award.
Photographer Paul Marotta shot this picture. You can observe that the background of the viral photo and the one in this photo are different. Moreover, none of the news reports on this event mentioned the presence of Narendra Modi. Additional searches on the internet to determine if both of them shared a stage together yielded no news reports validating it. The media would widely cover a meeting between such well-known personalities.
Furthermore, performing a reverse image search on Narendra Modi’s portion of the picture led us to a few Facebook posts from 2020 (here and here), but there was no mention of the occasion or event in which it was taken. A secondary search led us to a news report by The Tribune, which contained a mid-shot of him wearing the kurta seen in the viral photo. This report was from 2019 when he attended a traders’ convention in New Delhi.
In addition to this, we conducted another search to find more photos (here, here, and here) related to this event and found several full shots of him wearing the same dress as seen in the viral photo. Although we could not find the exact same picture, it could most possibly be from this event. You can see the video coverage of this event here.
With this evidence, we can conclude that two pictures shot on different occasions were morphed together to create the viral image.
To sum up, the photo of PM Modi staring inappropriately at Rihanna is morphed.