Fake account in Nita Ambani’s name claims Reliance gifted solar power plant for Ram Mandir

A Twitter handle @NitaAmabani posted a tweet on January 11 which reads, “Reliance gifted a solar power plant to Ram Mandir that’s why these Mughal descendants don’t like us.” The account, created in September last year, has over 17,000 followers with ‘Reliance Group’ in the bio. (Archive link)

रिलांयस ने राम मंदिर को कम्प्लीट “सौर ऊर्जा” प्लांट भेंट किया इसलिए चुभता है हमारा अम्बानी परिवार इन मुगलो की औलादो को..

— Nita Ambani (@NitaAmabani) January 11, 2021

The tweet was also posted on the Facebook group, ‘कट्टर मोदी समर्थक ग्रुप से जुड़ते ही अपने 51 साथियो को भी जोड़े (Join this group for hardcore Modi supporters and add 51 friends). This post had been shared more than 500 times at the time of writing.

The viral claim has been getting a lot of shares on Twitter and Facebook.

Fact-check

Alt News performed a keyword search and found an Economic Times article from January 15, 2021. It stated that a nationwide fundraising campaign was being organized for the construction of the Ram Mandir from January 15 to February 27. NDTV reported that President Ram Nath Kovind had donated an amount of Rs 5,00,100. However, we did not find any reports of the Reliance Group making a donation. There is also no information about this on the Reliance Foundation’s Twitter account.

Nita Ambani does not have a Twitter account. The handle which tweeted the viral claim is a fake account created in her name. The first clue is that it’s not verified. Apart from this, a quick look through the older tweets posted by this user are enough to establish that it is a fake account. Several political tweets have been issued from this account, with some targeting leaders like Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav. Had a well-known public figure like Nita Ambani made political statements against opposition leaders, they wouldn’t have gone unnoticed in the media.

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In a few replies to other tweets from earlier, the account’s username appears as @Ridhika_IAS. This means that it later changed its username to @NitaAmabani. You can see the archived version of the Twitter handle @Ridhika_IAS here. A search using the keyword ‘@Ridhika_IAS’ brings up tweets posted by @NitaAmabani.

When we compared the archived tweets with the current tweets posted by this handle, we noticed that the tweets are exactly the same apart from the changes username.

We also reached out to the Reliance Group and were informed by a spokesperson, “This Twitter account does not belong to Nita Ambani. ‘Ambani’ is also spelt wrong in the username @NitaAmabani.”

In 2019, another fake handle @NitaAmbaani had put out many tweets in support of Prime Minister Modi and Amit Shah.