This viral photo of Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi holding an ‘I Love Muhammad’ poster is AI-generated
On 26 September 2025, violence erupted in Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly, reportedly (here, here, and here) during a protest against police action on people who carried ‘I love Muhammad’ posters during an Eid-e-Milad-un-Nabi procession in Kanpur on 4 September 2025. Soon after that, security forces were deployed to control the situation. As per the reports, a video of an incident where police chased away people who took part in an ‘I Love Muhammad’ procession in Mau District was shared on social media. On 27 September 2025, the Uttar Pradesh Police arrested eight persons in relation to the violent clash in Bareilly, including a local Islamic Cleric named Tauqeer Raza Khan, who called for a demonstration.
In this context, a photo (here, here, and here) of Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra holding an ‘I Love Muhammad’ poster is doing the rounds on social media. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Photo of Rahul Gandhi and Priyanaka Gandhi Vadra holding ‘I Love Muhammad’ poster.
Fact: This is an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated image, not a real photograph. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a keyword search to find if Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra had recently posed with the ‘I Love Muhammad’ posters. However, we did not find any news reports that contained this photo. We did not find this photo on their social media handles either (here, here, and here).
While examining the viral photo, we noticed a few inconsistencies, such as incomplete text and an extra hand that appears between Rahul and Priyanka when they hold the poster. Such issues are generally found in AI-generated images.
Further, to learn more about the viral photo, we performed a reverse image search and found a high-quality version of it on Facebook.
This was uploaded by a Page named ‘Deeni Scholars’ on 25 September 2025. To verify if this is an AI-generated image, we ran it through an AI content detection tool named Hive, which concluded that it is 100% AI-generated content. The ‘Deeni Scholars’ page features multiple AI-generated images of celebrities holding ‘I Love Muhammad’ posters.
Additionally, we found that the Congress party has defended the ‘I Love Muhammad’ campaign. As per the media reports (here, here, and here), Congress’s media and publicity department head, Pavan Khera, said that ‘in a harmonious country that has seen the tradition of mystic saint Meerabai and Sufism, such “dwarfs” have come who see an enemy of our rich cultural tradition in a seven-year-old boy.’
To sum up, this viral photo of Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi holding an ‘I Love Muhammad’ poster is AI-generated.