No, Man Who Slapped Hardik Patel Was Not Seen With Rahul Gandhi

A viral post alleges that the man who slapped Hardik Patel is from Congress.

The viral post claiming that Hardik Patel’s attacker is from Congress is false.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint )

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CLAIM

A viral post claiming that the attack on Hardik Patel, on Friday, 19 April, was scripted by the Congress is doing the rounds on social media.

The post juxtaposed a picture of the attacker slapping Patel with a picture of Rahul Gandhi purportedly with the same attacker.

The two pictures are shared with a caption that states that the slap incident was scripted and called Hardik ‘the Kejriwal of Gujarat.’

The comparison is made between the two pictures alleging that the attacker is a affiliated to Congress. 

The same post was also shared by several users and pages on Facebook, including by @tiktokcamel, whose post was shared more than 1,200 times and had acquired more than 250 reactions at the time of writing this piece.

The post has gone viral on Facebook

The picture edit is being widely shared on Facebook with a similar narrative 

TRUE OR FALSE ?

The Quint, on cropping the first image in the post and conducting a reverse image search, found out that the two images are not of the same person.

The results found by conducting the reverse image search 

A similar image was found, which was traced back to NDTV’s photo archives of Rahul Gandhi’s Gujarat visit. The original image is from 23 December 2017.

A visually similar image shows that the picture is taken on December 2017 

On cropping the image further and reverse searching the man seen behind Rahul Gandhi, The Quint ascertained that he is, in fact, Anurgrah Narayan Singh, a Congress elected MLA from Allahabad North, Uttar Pradesh.

The man in the picture is recognised as Anugrah Narayan Singh, MLA from UP.

On the other hand, the man who slapped Hardik Patel, seen in the video of the incident that has since gone viral, was identified as Tarun Gajjar.

The attacker has been identified as Tarun Gajjar.

Clearly, the men shown in the two images are not the same, as the viral post alleges. The post makes a false claim in order to promote a political agenda, which might influence voters during the crucial 2019 Lok Sabha Elections.

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