CLAIM
A viral video of Rahul Gandhi has reemerged on social media, showing two juxtaposed clips of the Congress president making contradictory claims on farm loan waivers.
In the first 10-second clip, Gandhi can be heard saying: “किसान का कर्ज़ा माफ़ नहीं करना चाहिए क्योंकि अगर किसान का कर्ज़ा माफ़ किया तो किसान की आदत ख़राब हो जाएगी (farmers’ loans should not be waived off because if you forego their loans, they will get used to this)”.
This clip, which the viral post claims is from 2013, has been juxtaposed with a clip in which Gandhi is promising to waive off farmer loans if his party comes to power. The latter clip, the post claims, is from 2018.
The video was shared by several Facebook pages on social media – Narendra Modi for PM (500+ views), Achhe Din (43,000+ views), BJP4Indore (6,400+ views) – and by several individual users as well, like Lawrence Mali (41,000+ views) and Sunil Nehra (44,000+ shares).
The same video has been shared on multiple occasions starting 5 July 2018 till 1 April 2019. Madhya Pradesh BJP leader Atmaram Patel had also shared this clip.
THE TRUTH
A reverse image search of a key frame from the video led to a News18 Hindi article, that revealed that the ten-second clip is from an election rally in Chhattisgarh’s Bilaspur.
Looking through the videos posted by Congress’ official YouTube channel on the date of the rally helped locate the original source of the clipping.
After going through the unedited video, it becomes clear that the clip was carefully edited to use in a malicious context.
The clip has been extracted from a section of the speech that begins 27 minutes 50 seconds into the video. In it, Gandhi can be heard saying:
“Government had last year waived off Rs 2.5 lakh crore debt of India’s top 15 industrialists, but the same government... cannot write off the debt of crores of farmers. Their leaders say farmers’ loans should not be waived off because if you forego their loans, they will get used to this [sic].”
After establishing the context behind the statement, it becomes clear that Gandhi was taking potshots at BJP leaders for making such claims – that farmers get habituated to loan waivers.
NOT THE FIRST
This is not the first time that a dubious clip of Gandhi has been shared in the context of farm loan waivers.
Another viral video doing the rounds on social media claims that after the Congress’ recent victory, Gandhi had said that “farm loan waivers are not a solution”.
Several users had shared the video on Twitter and Facebook, including Union Minister Smriti Irani, who had retweeted the video.
In this instance as well, the video in question was clipped to make it seem as though Gandhi was backtracking on his earlier loan waiver promise.
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