A video showing a Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS)'s Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) from the Jubilee Hills constituency in Telangana, Maganti Gopinath, being questioned by a woman has gone viral.
What is the claim?: Those sharing have claimed that recently, a woman publicly scrutinised Gopinath for "neglecting public issues", ahead of the 2023 Telangana elections.
Who shared it?: This video was shared by Vishnu Vardhan Reddy, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) State Vice President from Andhra Pradesh on his official X (formerly Twitter) account.
An archive of the post can be found here.
(Source: X/Screenshot)
How did we find out?: We divided the viral video into multiple keyframes and ran a Google reverse image search on some of them.
We found a video on YouTube by Raj News Telugu Official dated 10 November 2018.
We compared the frames of the two videos and found similarities.
Here are similarities between both the videos.
(Source: Altered by The Quint)
Here are similarities between both the videos.
(Source: Altered by The Quint)
The video was uploaded with the caption that read, "Jubilee Hills TRS Ex MLA Maganti Gopinath Insulted in Election Campaign."
We translated one of the the captions appearing on the video from Telugu to English and it loosely translated to: "Locals are angry that the promises given in the past have not been fulfilled."
We also found a similar video uploaded by A18 Telangana News on 10 November 2018 with the caption, "A Woman Insulted the TRS Jubilee Hills Candidate Gopinath Maganti During an Election Rally."
We noticed that the scarf of the person the viral video had the letters TRS written on it, which stood for Telangana Rashtra Samithi.
The Quint reported on 5 October 2022 that the party led by K Chandrashekhar Rao (KCR) had announced a change in name from TRS to the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS).
The Election Commission of India (ECI) gave its nod to this change in December 2022.
Conclusion: While the public did express their anger towards the Jubilee Hills MLA, it is not a recent video and dates back to 2018. It is being falsely linked to the ongoing Telangana state elections.
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