An old Hindi newspaper clipping digitally translated in English has resurfaced with a false claim that it shows an article published by a San Francisco-based newspaper criticising Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.
The claim further alleges that the US newspaper questioned Gandhi's nationality because his remarks sounded as though he were an enemy of India.
BOOM found that the photo is a translated version of a Hindi article, not an English report published by a US-based newspaper.
Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, visited the United States on September 8, 2024, for three days in an effort to 'strengthen the bond' between India and America. During his visit Gandhi met several American lawmakers; meanwhile, BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya attacked the Congress leader for meeting Ilhan Omar in the USA, accusing the party of acting against India's interests.
In an interview with Press Trust of India (PTI), former Union minister and senior BJP leader Anurag Thakur also claimed that people in America have started questioning whether Rahul Gandhi is from India or Pakistan. Thakur in his interaction, says, "Now even American people have started writing that Rahul Gandhi is not from India but from Pakistan."
Amid the criticism of Rahul Gandhi by BJP leaders, the old photo that was fact-checked by BOOM in 2023 has resurfaced and is now being circulated by several right-wing users.
The picture is being shared with a caption, "The San Francisco based newspaper headline whether "Rahul Gandhi came from India or Pakistan". They wrote this because the way he was talking about India, It sounded like an enemy of India can only speak like that. What a shame.. Rahul Gandhi and Congress".
Click here to view the post and here for an archive.
Fact Check
BOOM debunked the same viral photo in 2023 when it went viral with similar false captions. Despite performing several keyword searches across multiple web search engines, we could not find the same English report online.
Furthermore, we observed multiple discrepancies in the report, including inconsistent font sizes throughout the text. This is a common issue seen when translating text using tools like Google Lens or instant camera translation features.
Taking a cue, we translated the headline of the article into Hindi and searched for it on social media. This led us to a Twitter/X post featuring an image of the exact same article, but in Hindi.
The user shared a screenshot with a Hindi caption that corroborated to the English title of the viral news report: "अमेरिकी पूछ रहे हैं की राहुल भारत के है या पाकिस्तान को??? प्रश्न तो सही है।।।"
An archived version of the post can be seen here.
It is important to note that the Hindi article did not have any font discrepancies, unlike the English version. This suggests that the English article is merely a translated version of the Hindi article.
BOOM was unable to find the source where the article was published. However, we were able to confirm that the article was originally written in Hindi, and not an English edition published by a San Francisco-based newspaper.