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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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