Fact-Check: Rahul Gandhi Never Said He Would Stop Bharat Jodo Yatra

A Delhi BJP leader recently shared a video of Rahul Gandhi claiming he would stop the Bharat Jodo Yatra if it didn't work. But that was not so. A PTI Fact-Check investigation revealed that the former Congress president's remark was in response to a question on his wearing a T-shirt in north India's biting cold and not on the yatra.

The nine-second video shared in a tweet by Delhi BJP general secretary Kuljeet Singh Chahal on December 28 pulled out the clip and used it out of context. The post was shared by scores of people.

The fact-check to establish the veracity of the claim began with the help of the InVid tool, a video verification platform to assess the reliability of video content spread via social media.

The tool took out a few screengrabs from the video. A Google Reverse Image Search on one of the keyframes led to a 12-second video posted in a tweet by a News 18 journalist on December 28.

While scanning the video, the team found that Rahul Gandhi's remarks were in response to a query about him wearing a half-sleeve T-shirt in winter, an issue that has led to much curiosity about how he manages to stay warm in the cold.

There was no mention of the yatra at all in the video, which showed Gandhi dressed in the familiar white tee with a bunch of people. Someone asks in Hindi, "T shirt hi rahegi kya (Till when will the T- shirt stay)?' To this he responds, "Jab tak chal rahi hai chalayenge, jab nahin karegi band kar denge (It will remain like this till required. I will stop when it stops working)." The same video was posted in a tweet by Congress' Rajya Sabha MP Imran Pratapgarhi.

The Bharat Jodo Yatra, which started from Kanyakumari on September 7, will end with Gandhi hoisting the national flag in Srinagar on January 30. The march, which has resumed after a break, has so far covered Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, and Delhi.