A photo of Arvind Kejriwal with Bhagwant Mann is widely being circulated on social media. In the photo, it appears that the two politicians are sitting outside a government registered liquor store. Punjab is going to the polls next month and this photo is being shared at a time when there are reports that the AAP will announce Bhagwant Mann as the CM candidate.

The photo has also been shared to mock the AAP-led Delhi government’s new liquor policy under which 400 liquor vend licenses were issued to private players last year. Moreover, the Delhi government plans to start home delivery of liquor very soon and had introduced a bill related to it in June 2021.

On Twitter, the photo was shared by Kamaljeet Sehrawat, the former mayor of South Delhi Municipal Corporation and a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party. It drew over 11,000 likes and more than 2,000 retweets.

The photo was also shared by various other Twitter users.

Morphed image

From the very first look, it is obvious that the photo is manipulated. To understand the level of manipulation, we performed an ELA (Error Level Analysis) on the photo using FotoForensics. Below we have uploaded the result. The pixels in purple tell us that there has been some manipulation.

It is important to note that ELA is just one factor that helps determine whether an image is manipulated or not, and it cannot be accepted as a piece of conclusive evidence. But there are some other red flags that can be observed in this image:

  • The quality of the image is different depending upon where you look. If you look at the two politicians in the front, they appear to be more pixelated while the background appears to be more sharp/defined.
  • The lighting is uneven — Bhagwant Mann and Arvind Kejriwal have a different level of exposure to the Sun compared to the background.

We performed a Google reverse image search on the viral photo and found the photo of the liquor shop in a news report by Navbharat Times. The article does not cite the source of the image. The photo of Bhagwant Mann and Arvind Kejriwal was edited into this photo.

The photo of the two leaders is from CM Kejriwal’s recent visit to farms in Punjab where he was accompanied by Bhagwant Mann. During this visit, the two met with farmers and had lunch with them. Photos of this visit can be found in this report by ABP news.

A video of this visit can also be found on Bhagwant Mann’s official Facebook page. Below we have added a screenshot from the video that shows the two politicians in the exact position as in the viral image.

Hence, a morphed photo of Arvind Kejriwal and Bhagwant Mann was shared to mock the two politicians as the date for Punjab polls comes closer.

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About the Author

Kalim is a journalist with a keen interest in tech, misinformation, culture, etc