A video of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati, where she is heard extending support for the Congress party in the 2023 Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections is being shared on social media.
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(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)
How did we find out?: We carried out a keyword search for reports of Mayawati extending support for the Congress party in Madhya Pradesh.
This led us to news reports from 2018, which mentioned that she had extended support for the Congress party in the Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan Assembly elections.
The BSP reportedly took this step in order to keep the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) out of power in said states. The Quint had published an article regarding this on 12 December 2018 as well.
However, we found no recent reports or social media posts which said that the BSP, or Mayawati, had extended their support for the Congress party.
Next, we looked for the video in the claim.
We noticed that the video carried the watermark of 'UP Tak', a subsidiary of the India Today group.
Taking a cue from this, we looked for their coverage of BSP and Mayawati. This led us to a livestream on their verified YouTube channel which was streamed on 13 June 2023.
Around the 3:22 mark in this video, one can see that Mayawati's movements match the visuals from the viral claim.
The video, which was streamed five months ago, shows the BSP chief talking about how the BJP and Congress were competing to show that they were bigger followers of Hindutva but were sidelining other religions.
She adds that the BSP, as always, stands for all religions and appeals for other parties not to neglect them. Mayawati goes on to say that BSP believes that historical places and records of all religions should be respected and maintained.
Specifically talking about Madhya Pradesh, she says that the "double engine" government in the state must work against the systemic exploitation of Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs and should address the growing poverty, unemployment and inflation.
With this, Mayawati announced that the BSP would run for Assembly elections in all five states on these issues.
Conclusion: An altered video of BSP supremo Mayawati has gone viral with the false claim that she expressed support for the Congress party amid the 2023 Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections.
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