A doctored video of Union Minister for Women and Child Development Smriti Irani is being shared on social media purportedly showing Irani commenting about recent fuel price hikes and hailing it as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's masterstroke for the poor in India.
In the 20 seconds long video, Irani can be heard saying, "...our Prime Minister Narendra Modi helped the poor by increasing petrol prices and launched a masterstroke against the rich. The rich drive cars. We ensured the safety of the poor people's feet so that they can pull their carts and drive their rickshaws."
Prices of petrol and diesel have seen calibrated hikes daily over the past fortnight. The video is being shared in this context.
The Hindi caption with the video translates to, "Smriti Irani gave a statement on the petrol price hike. Modiji's masterstroke".
(Original Text in Hindi: स्मृति ईरानी ने पेट्रोल की बढ़ती कीमत पर बयान दे ही दिया। मोदीजी का मास्टर स्ट्रोक)
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Fact Check
The video of Smriti Irani hailing recent fuel price hikes as a 'masterstroke', is doctored by dubbing over the original video.
If one watches the video carefully, a transparent watermark stating 'satire' can be seen on the bottom right corner of the video. A relevant keyword search showed us several Twitter users shared the video on April 1, 2022.
The watermark in the video is highlighted below.
We also performed a reverse image search on some of the keyframes from the video and found news agency ANI's tweet published on February 14, 2021. The tweet carried the same video with a caption saying, "The spiteful & vengeful politics of Rahul Gandhi which insults not only the people & voters of Amethi but seeks to create a divide between the north & south India is to be condemned by every Indian citizen," says Union Minister Smriti Irani."
Click here to view the tweet.
We also found a Hindustan Times article published on the same date reporting about her comment. According to the article, "Her (Smriti Irani) reaction comes in the backdrop of Gandhi's comments at the 'Aishwarya Yatra' in the southern state that he was used to a "different type of politics" in north India and that coming to Kerala was "very refreshing" as people are interested in "issues.""
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