The Uttar Pradesh assembly elections will be conducted in early 2022 and political misinformation ahead of the polls has begun making the rounds. A screenshot of an alleged tweet by Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav has been shared online. “If our government comes to power in Uttar Pradesh, we promise our Muslim brothers that we will reconstruct the Babri Masjid at the same place the Ram Mandir is being built today,” the purported tweet reads. Below are verification requests that Alt News received on its app and WhatsApp helpline number (+91 76000 11160).
A page BJP For New India drew over 400 shares for the purported tweet. It was also posted on a group called
We Support Yati Narsinghanand Saraswati Ji.
Twitter user @khayal_a_vakt shared the image earlier in July.
😡😠 ऐसे लोगों को वोट देना सनातन धर्म का अपमान है।
देख लो क्या विचार हैं अखिलेशुद्दीन के👇#नहीं_चाहिए_सपा।।जय श्री राम।। pic.twitter.com/KdCyD17QcH
— भारतीय🇮🇳 #3ह ( 12.7K ) (@khayal_a_vakt) July 20, 2021
The screenshot was circulating widely on Facebook. 
Fake tweet
Alt News performed a keyword search using the text in the alleged tweet. However, we could not find any such post on Akhilesh Yadav’s Twitter timeline. It is possible that the tweet has been deleted so we took to archive websites (archive.is, webarchive.org) to locate an archived version. But this too did not render results.
Upon further examination of the text in the post, we discovered that the tweet is misaligned. We have compared the viral tweet with a genuine tweet below to highlight the difference. Since the viral screenshot appears to have been taken on a mobile phone, we have compared it with a screenshot of a genuine tweet on a mobile phone. Readers are requested to zoom in on the comparison and carefully notice that the comment icon on the genuine tweet does not touch the line of alignment.
It must be pointed that had Akhilesh Yadav made such a controversial statement on Ram Mandir, it would have garnered widespread media coverage. A lack of reports further points that the tweet is fake. Over the past few years, Yadav has not criticised the Supreme Court’s verdict. In 2019, he had tweeted that decisions that bring people closer, make us better human beings and last year he said that he will visit the temple with his family once the construction is completed.
Therefore, a fake tweet was made viral to show Akhilesh Yadav promising the Muslim community that Babri Masjid will be reconstructed on the land where it used to exist and where the Ram Mandir is now being developed.
