Congress social media head shares old, misleading video about PM Modi’s education

“बड़ी मुश्किल से विडियो ढूंढा है, ये 1998 का इन्टरव्यू है जिसमे साहब खुद कह रहे है हाई स्कूल तक पढा हूँ, लेकिन आज साहब के पास ग्रेजुएशन की डिग्री है जो 1979 मे किया था !! (Found this video with great difficulty, it’s a 1998 interview in which sir himself is saying that I have studied till high school. But now sir has a graduation degree attained in 1979 -translated)” tweeted Divya Spandana, social media head of the Congress party with an old clipped interview of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. So far, her tweet has received more than 7,100 likes and 3,600 retweets. It has also been viewed more than 53,000 times.

बड़ी मुश्किल से विडियो ढूंढा है, ये 1998 का इन्टरव्यू है जिसमे साहब खुद कह रहे है हाई स्कूल तक पढा हूँ, लेकिन आज साहब के पास ग्रेजुएशन की डिग्री है जो 1979 मे किया था !! pic.twitter.com/zr2DLBDv6i

— Divya Spandana/Ramya (@divyaspandana) September 18, 2018

Spandana shared the clipped video, six months after Alt News found that it was cropped to suggest that PM himself claimed to have studied till high school. It has been circulating on social media for at least three years now and we found an instance of the clipped video dating back to November 2015. In the longer version of the same video, Modi goes on to say that he did his BA and MA through external examination.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTTqEfuD3B8

Divya Spandana later realised her error and acknowledged that it was indeed a clipped version of the original video by posting an Alt News article, but refrained from deleting her tweet.

So that’s not the entire clip! Whatsapp 🤦🏽‍♀️ https://t.co/NwfJWQcbsQ

— Divya Spandana/Ramya (@divyaspandana) September 18, 2018

Ruchi Gupta, Joint Secretary AICC and NSUI in-charge had also shared the same video on September 17, 2018, which was retweeted by the official handle of NSUI.

Political parties often latch onto unverified content shared on social media in haste to score brownie points. This instance was no different and a little research on the internet would have revealed the truth of this video.