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| - Fact Check: Jinping didn't endorse Rahul Gandhi's Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra, viral screenshot is fake
India Today discovered that the viral screenshot is fake and digitally created.
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India Today Fact Check
The viral screenshot is fake and digitally created. Xi Jinping has made no such comment.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra entered Nagaland on January 15 after spending two days in violence-gripped Manipur. The Congress rally, spanning 6,200 km across 14 states from east to west, is now being dubbed by some as a "Chinese franchise”. This assertion is supported by a screenshot from a Global Times post on X. The Global Times is a state-controlled news outlet from China.
According to the post, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping expressed his gratitude toward Rahul Gandhi for respecting China's sovereignty by starting his Yatra from Manipur instead of “occupied Arunachal Pradesh”.
Sharing this screenshot, one person wrote on X: “What did I told you on day one when this yatra first route was published, Arunachal was left out. Congress means Chinese franchise.” The archive of one such post can be seen here.
India Today, however, found that the viral screenshot was forged. Xi Jinping made no such comment and the Global Times did not report this.
Our Probe
We checked all social media accounts of Global Times to look for posts even remotely related to Gandhi or Congress's the Bharat Nyay Jodo Yatra. A perusal of their website also yielded no such report.
Further keyword searches on the internet failed to produce any media reports about Xi Jinping's alleged statement. If such a statement had been made, it would have been widely covered by both Chinese and Indian news outlets.
Upon close observation of the viral screenshot, we noted irregularities, including a shredded bottom, uneven borders, stray cutouts of a face, and random objects in Jinping’s photo.
Thus, it is evident that a screenshot of a fabricated tweet by a Chinese media portal is being circulated to undermine Gandhi’s yatra.
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