Clipped video revived to suggest Rahul Gandhi spoke against farm loan waivers

In a 10-second clip of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is widespread on social media against the backdrop of farmers’ protest. Gandhi can be heard saying in the video, “की किसान का कर्ज़ा माफ़ नहीं करना चाहिए क्योंकि अगर किसान का कर्ज़ा माफ़ किया तो किसान की आदत ख़राब हो जाएगी (Farmers’ loans shouldn’t be waived-off because if they are, farmers will get used to loan waivers.)”

Several Facebook users have shared the video.

Viral since 2018

In the aftermath of the Congress party’s victory in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan assembly elections in 2018, the same video was shared online.

The post below has 20,000 shares.

On December 19, 2018 one Sunil Nehra had posted this clip on a Facebook group with the message, “थोड़ा वायरल कर दोगे तो 4 दिन बाद माफी मांगते हुए नजर आएगा (Make it go viral and you will see him apologizing after four days)”. At the time of writing this article, it had been shared close to 21,000 times.

A Twitter user @Lala_The_Don had tweeted the clip on June 18, 2018 claiming, “This is what Rahul baba thinks about farmer and farmers loan waiver”. It was one of the earliest instances that Alt News could trace. The same clip, shared at around the same time by Rag Darbari, a Facebook page has been shared more than 22,000 times and viewed over 500,000 times. BJP leader Atmaram Patel also shared this clip from Rag Darbari suggesting that Rahul Gandhi made such a statement.

Merged clips of the same speech

In our report from 2018, Alt News found that this video was clipped from a speech delivered by Rahul Gandhi at a public rally in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh in May 2018.

At 27:52 in the above video, Rahul Gandhi can be heard saying, “Last year, the Indian government had waived off Rs 2.5 lakh crore debt of India’s top 15 industrialists but the same government which can forgive Rs 2.5 lakhs crore for these fifteen people, cannot write off the debt of crores of farmers. Their leaders say that farmers’ loans shouldn’t be waived-off because if they are, farmers will get used to getting remittances. It’s a strange world, where the richest people in India won’t get used to their loan getting waived off.” Gandhi was actually taking a jibe at BJP leaders for saying that farmers will get habituated to loan waivers.

This video was maliciously clipped to suggest that Rahul Gandhi made a statement against farm loan waivers when the opposite was promised by him in his election campaign.