Did Rahul Gandhi say ‘I don’t get any disease, I have direct connection with God’? No, viral video is clipped

by Oishani Bhattacharya

A 15-second-long clip in which Rahul Gandhi says, “I don’t get any disease, I have a direct connection from above, I directly speak to God,” is being shared by social media users to mock the Congress leader for his bizarre statement.

X user Megh Updates @MeghUpdates shared the clip on October 30 and at the time of writing this report, the post had over 100,000 views and was reposted over 800 times. (Archive)

Readers should note that this user has been found spreading misinformation several times in the past.

Another X user, राहुल देव Rahul Dev (@rahuldev2), also posted the same clip. This post received more than 124,000 views and was reposted over 200 times. (Archive)

This user has been fact-checked by Alt News before.

Several other users posted the same clip mocking the Congress leader for making a bizarre statement. Below are a few instances.

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Fact Check

To verify the authenticity of this video, we broke it down into several keyframes and ran a reverse image search on some of them. This led us to an X post by news agency ANI on October 29, where a longer video of Gandhi’s speech from the same event was shared. In the caption, ANI mentioned that the event took place in Darbhanga, Bihar — where assembly elections are slated to take place this week.

In this 3:02-minute-long video, Gandhi can be heard talking about Prime Minister Narendra Modi taking a bath in the Yamuna River, and he goes on to say that the Prime Minister would go to any extent for the sake of votes. At the 1:09-minute mark, Gandhi says, “…No one can get into that water, it is so dirty. If you go into it, then you will fall sick and get infected right there. But Modiji did drama there… he created a little pond, you saw it, right? This is the state of India. They will do anything during elections. ‘Look, I have a 56-inch chest and I am taking a bath in the Yamuna. I don’t get any diseases; I have a direct connection with the above. I directly speak to God. Nothing will happen to me due to Yamuna’s water’. Then, they will install a pipe from behind and pour clean water inside. Then the media will show that Modiji took a bath in the Yamuna.”

From the above context, it is clear that Gandhi was mocking Modi when he said, “I don’t get any diseases; I have a direct connection with the above. I directly speak to God,” while talking about the prime minister taking a bath in the Yamuna.

It should be noted that ANI, in its caption, translated the clip to English except the part where Gandhi mockingly said that PM Modi has a ‘direct connection with God’.

Interestingly, on October 25, The Hindu reported that according to the Delhi Pollution Control Committee’s (DPCC) monthly report, the Yamuna River’s water quality in Delhi worsened and was unfit for bathing. However, right before Chhath Puja, Delhi Water Minister Parvesh Sahib Singh stated that there had been a 90% reduction in faecal coliform levels in the Yamuna from 2024.

However, according to a Newslaundry investigation, instead of reducing the pollution in the Yamuna, the Delhi government had been adding clean water to the river.

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