Exclusive: ‘+6.30’ in Rahul Gandhi’s ‘vote theft’ PDF metadata does not prove it’s made in Myanmar

by Abhishek Kumar

BJP spokesperson Pradeep Bhandari on September 10, 2025, shared a post on X alleging that the PDF version of Rahul Gandhi’s ‘vote theft’ presentation available on the Congress leader’s website had been uploaded from outside India. 

Rahul Gandhi had held a press conference in New Delhi on August 7 to show alleged irregularities in voter lists, and had further alleged that the Election Commission, in collusion with the BJP, was indulging in ‘vote theft’. During the presser, he had made a power-point presentation, and later, its content was uploaded as PDF flies on his website in Hindi, English and Kannada.

Bhandari, as one can see in the X post above, alleged that Rahul Gandhi was being driven by a “foreign boss” and “investigation” based on the metadata of the PDF had “uncovered” that they had been made in Myanmar.

News18 ran a bulletin on this where they used Bhandari’s post. They claimed, “Rahul’s vote theft PDF was prepared in Myanmar!” 

The claim was first made by an X handle named @Khurpenchh. In a thread, they claimed that when the metadata of the PDF was extracted, the time zone of “Myanmar” (+6:30) was found in the ‘Create Date’ section of the PDFs of all three languages. 

It is further claimed that the PDF was created by Adobe Illustrator software, which would take the time zone of the computer being used. And the time zone was +6:30 MMT (Myanmar time zone).

The user also explains that the PDFs are shared via links to Google Drive which did not affect the metadata of the PDF. And VPN would take the time zone of the system clock and would never change the same.

The thread is concluded by drawing attention to the situations in India’s neighboring countries — Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal.

X users like Shivam Tyagi, Ajeet Bharti and others amplified the claim. BJP National Spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla held a press conference on September 11 to make the same allegation against Rahul Gandhi.
Pro-BJP influencer Rishi Bagree, who shares communal propaganda and misinformation on a regular basis, went as far as to suggest that foreign entities were conspiring to undermine Indian democracy and drive India toward a crisis similar to Nepal’s.  

Fact Check

First of all, it is to be noted that in the screenshot posted by the handle Khurpenchh, three dates and times are mentioned in the metadata of the file. These are Metadata Date, Modify Date and Create Date. The date and time are exactly the same in all three places. However, the Metadata Date and Modify Date have ‘+5:30′ (i.e., Indian Standard Time) written against them, while the Create Date has ‘+6:30′ (i.e., Myanmar Standard Time) written against it. Based on this ‘+6.30’, it i being claimed that the PDF was created in Myanmar.

Before we go into a technical analysis, it becomes imperative to ask how it is logically possible that the Create Date of a file is in Myanmar time zone, and its Metadata Date and Modify Date are captured in India time zone, and all three show the exact same time down to the seconds (2025:08:07/13.14.39)?

Now, let us come to the technical analysis. 

We noticed that in the screenshot shared by the handle Khurpench, the name of the creator tool is written as Adobe Illustrator and the name of the metadata tool is written as Exiftool. To verify the claim viral on social media, we created a dummy PDF file on Adobe Illustrator installed in our computer with Windows operating system and checked its metadata with the help of the same tool, Exiftool.

In the metadata of our dummy file too (see below), the date and time are exactly the same in all three places — Metadata Date, Modify Date and Create Date (2025:09:11/12:58:49). However, the first two (Metadata Date and Modify Date) have +5:30 written against India time, whereas the Create Date is shown as +6:30.

This suggests that the claim that Rahul Gandhi’s PDF was created in Myanmar since Create Date shows ‘+6.30’ is misleading. In fact, this has happened due to an error in the Adobe Illustrator application.

We have screen recorded this entire process, which can be seen below, in which we have used the offline metadata viewer tool Exiftool and the online metadata viewer tool Metadata2go. For transparency reasons, we are uploading a dummy file here, which can be downloaded and its metadata can be checked using exiftool or metadata2go.

One thing to note in the following video video is that the time shown on the computer and the time shown in the metadata are exactly the same, i.e., (GMT+5:30). This application captures in metadata the date and time of the computer on which it is installed. This is not possible with (GMT+6:30). If Myanmar’s time zone (GMT+6:30) was applied, it would have been one hour ahead of India’s time, but the metadata does not show that. This proves that this is just an application error.

To verify this further, we checked the metadata from another computer. A dummy file was created using Adobe Illustrator on this computer. Here also, the same thing was observed in the file’s metadata captured through offline metadata viewer tool Exiftool and online metadata viewer tool Metadata2go. The Metadata Date and Modify Date are shown as +5:30, while the Create Date is +6:30. This once again confirms that this is an error in the Adobe Illustrator application. It has nothing to do with Myanmar.

To sum up, the mention of +6.30 in the metadata of the PDF file on Rahul Gandhi’s website does not prove that it was made in Myanmar. Alt News’s investigation suggests it is an application error.

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About the Author

Abhishek is a senior fact-checking journalist and researcher at Alt News. He has a keen interest in information verification and technology. He is always eager to learn new skills, explore new OSINT tools and techniques. Prior to joining Alt News, he worked in the field of content development and analysis with a major focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO).