X Account Impersonating Former PM Manmohan Singh Shares Posts Praising PM Modi
Former PM Manmohan Singh does not have an account on X. This now-suspended account was impersonating Singh.
Fact-Check: This is not the former PM's real account.
(Source: Altered by The Quint)
Two posts, purportedly written by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on X is being shared on social media platforms. These posts are written in praise of PM Narendra Modi.
What does the post say?: The post is written in Hindi and when translated to English says as follows:
"I could have made big decisions too, but Congress did not allow me to do any work of my free will. The country is doing well because Narendra Modi makes his judgement."
"Today I openly say that a leader and Prime Minister like Modi will not be born again in the whole world."
An archive of the post can be found here.
We received a query about this on our WhatsApp tipline. (Archives of similar claims can be found here, here and here.)
Is this true?: No, the posts are fake and the former PM has not made any such statements praising PM Modi.
Saral Patel, the national convener of the Congress wrote on his official X account in 2020 that the former PM Singh does not have an X account.
Additionally, the X account in the purported post does not lead to any existing accounts.
How did we find out?: At first, we checked for X account '@manmohan_5' that is mentioned in the posts.
However, we did not find the account. X led us to a page that said, "account does not exist."
Here is a the link to this page.
We looked further and noticed that upon searching on '@manmohan_5' on X, many users had tagged one '@mohitguptaBTI'.
Several replies on this account's posts were from September 2021.
Archive to the page can be found here.
Archive to the page can be found here.
This is noteworthy because the same claim also went viral in 2021. Archives of those claims can be found here and here.
To investigate further, we checked for the said account's old posts on Wayback Machine.
In the archives, we noticed one of the post's that is mentioned in the viral claim.
An archive of the post can be found here.
Apart from this, we also found other posts in which the account spoke against the Congress.
An archive of the post can be found here.
An archive of the post can be found here.
Congress's Statement: The party's national convenor, Saral Patel took to his official X account on 19 June 2020 and confirmed that former PM Singh is not on X.
We also came across a post by the former PM's account on Facebook from 23 January 2012.
It mentioned that the "official Twitter account of the Prime Minister's office launched today. Follow him on @PMOIndia."
This account still exists on X. It is currently run by the incumbent prime minister's office.
Conclusion: It is clear that the Manmohan Singh does not have an account on X. The post is fake and has been falsely shared to claim that the former PM praised PM Modi.
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