An eight-second-long clip featuring Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar and finance minister Samrat Choudhary is viral where a crowd is heard chanting “Vote chor, Gaddi chhod” (Vote thief, leave the throne). This is being shared in the context of the series of ‘Vote theft’ allegations brought by Rahul Gandhi against the BJP and the Election Commission.

Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) is in an alliance with the BJP in Bihar and Choudhary is a leader of the BJP.

X user Gyan Prakash Yadav #INDIA (@Gyanpra65533145), who claims to be a Samajwadi party member, posted the above-mentioned clip on X on October 6 claiming the slogan had been raised when Nitish Kumar and Samrat Chaudhary were sharing the stage. (Archive)

X handle Kota Congress Sevadal (@SevadalKOT) also shared the same clip on October 6 with a similar claim. (Archive)

Several other users, such as @chandanjnu, @ChhutPujan, @IWCRajasthan and others, posted the viral clip claiming that it showed what the public felt about the BJP and its allies.

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Fact Check

To verify the authenticity of this clip, we first broke down the video into multiple keyframes and then ran a reverse image search on a few of them. This led us to a YouTube video posted by the channel THE INDIAN CLUB LIVE on September 25. The title of the video said, “In Sasaram, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar laid the foundation stone and inaugurated projects worth ₹921 crore”.

In the video, Nitish Kumar and Samrat Choudhary are seen disembarking from a helicopter as chants of ‘zindabad’ are heard in the background. The chants continue as the two walk up to the dais and take a seat. The part of the video which has now gone viral begins at the 1:16-minute mark. At no point did the crowd chant ‘vote chor, gaddi chhod”.

The video is from Sasaram in Bihar, where last month, Nitish Kumar attended an event where he inaugurated and laid the foundation stone for 124 development projects worth Rs 921 crores.

We found clips from the same event posted by several users on Facebook, and in none of them can one hear the said chants.

Alt News also reached out to a Bihar-based Dainik Bhaskar journalist, Amit, who was present at the event. He confirmed to us that no such slogans were raised at the event.

Additionally, had such slogans indeed been raised, there would have been some coverage by the media; however, none of the reports of Nitish Kumar’s event mentioned this.

Hence, it is clear that the audio in the viral clip has been imposed, and such slogans were not raised.

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