CLAIM
A post claiming to be a tweet from Janhvi Kapoor supporting Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been making rounds on social media.
The tweet depicts a famous still of Janhvi from her movie Dhadak with the caption saying, “I do not understand politics but know that the country needs Modi ji”.
The tweet has been posted from a Twitter handle called @realjanhvi.
It had over 3,000 shares, over 11,000 likes and over 700 comments when this article was written.
A screenshot of the tweet is being widely shared on Facebook with a caption which reads: “Country Needs modi" said by Janhvi Kapoor who is the daughter of actress Sridevi.Also she is first time voter”.
TRUE OR FALSE?
The Quint on confirming with Janhvi’s team, found that she is not on Twitter. The account which claims to be the actress’ official account has more than 26,000 followers and is not verified by Twitter .
The account, which was created in 2017, was also seen liking pro-BJP tweets. The account has only been active since April 2019, the Lok Sabha election period.
The account had 3 Twtter broadcasts.
The first one named #BJPVijaySankalp had BJP supporters dancing on songs which proclaimed Modi’s victory.
The second broadcast titled ‘phir ek baar Modi sarkar’ had a sound recording by Sandeep Acharya which centered around the Ayodhya temple. “mandir na bana toh bavaal hoga, suniye Babar ke sapole, hoge Ayodhaya Lal,” it says, which loosely translates to “ If the mandir isnt constructed in Ayodhya , there shall be chaos and violence , listen oh snake of Babar.”
The third broadcast featured a poet Prkhayat Mishra who recited a poem on Kar Sevaks and Lord Ram.
Clearly, this is not the Bolllywood actress’ official account, it has been made to push a certain political and religious thought forward in the ongoing election period.
SO WHO DOES THE ACCOUNT REALLY BELONG TO?
A detailed investigation by fake news debunking website Alt News shows that the Twitter ID of the account in question was ‘871660301371924481’.
Using this as a lead, searching the Twitter ID on Google, an account called ‘govinddeshpremi’ showed up in the results .
A subsequent search for old tweets where ‘govinddeshpremi’ suggested that the account ‘govinddeshpremi’ has been renamed ‘realjanhvi’.
Alt News also located the Google cache of ‘govinddeshpremi’ account.
On looking up the HTML source code of the page, the website ascertained that the account had the same numeric Twitter ID as the ‘realjanhvi’ handle.
Further, Alt News accessed screenshots of the ‘govinddeshpremi’ account shared by other Twitter users and found that it was owned by one ‘Chowkidar Govind Saroj’.
Alt News then located Govind Saroj’s (govinddeshpremi) Facebook page where a similar pattern was observed – a page called Shobha Devi was merged to create the said person’s Facebook page. Presently, Saroj uses the Twitter id ‘govindnamo‘.
(Editor’s note: This story was first published on 17 April and was updated on 18 April at 1:30 pm to incorporate additional inputs from Alt News’s investigation)
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