Did Modi say his mother should’ve stopped him from committing petty thefts? No, it’s a clipped video

A 10-second video is viral on social media in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is giving a speech from a stage. In the video, Modi says, “If my mother had stopped me from committing small thefts, I would not have become such a big looter”. Sharing this video without any context, it is being claimed that Prime Minister Modi had said this about himself.

Journalist Kavish Aziz tweeted the 10-second video of the Prime Minister’s speech. (Archive link)

जब मैं छोटी चोरी करता था..उस दिन अगर मेरी मां ने रोका होता… तो आज मै इतना बड़ा लुटेरा नहीं बनता.. pic.twitter.com/U0cgc63u97

— Kavish Aziz (@azizkavish) September 6, 2022

Journalist Dinesh Kumar, too, tweeted the clip. (Archive link)

A Facebook user named Mohammad Javed Akhtar shared the 10-second video. It got more than 6 lakh views till the time of the writing of this article.

This video is viral on Facebook and Twitter.

Fact-check

Alt News performed a reverse image search of a frame of the viral video on Google. We found the video of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s YouTube channel in the search result. On 10 April 2021, the channel uploaded a video of Prime Minister Modi’s speech in Siliguri, West Bengal. The viral video is part of this speech. In the video of PM Modi’s entire speech, the part of the viral video can be seen after 40 minutes 38 seconds.

At the 39.39-minute mark in the original video, Modi broaches the topic. He says “when we were younger, we heard a story. In that story, there was a very big dacoit who was sentenced to death. After the sentence, he was asked what his last wish was. So he said he wanted to meet his mother. Then the government made arrangements so that before going to the gallows, he could meet his mother. When he met his mother, he snapped at her and cut off her nose. Before being hanged to death, he cut off his mother’s nose. So people asked him why did that to his mother. He said if my mother had stopped me from committing small thefts when I was a child, I would not have become such a big looter, and today I would not have been sentenced to death.”

To sum it up, in the viral video, PM Modi was talking about theft and robbery in the context of a story. But the clipped video of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech was shared without context by many journalists and social media users.