Shah Rukh Khan’s father was not six during Quit India movement – false claim viral

by Kinjal

A newspaper clipping of a report on Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan’s father is viral on social media. It is titled, “Shah Rukh Khan’s father Mir Taj Mohammad Khan was one of the youngest freedom fighters in the Quit India Movement.”

Several users are sharing the picture and claiming that Mir Taj Mohammad Khan was 30 years old when Shah Rukh was born in 1965. Therefore, his father must have been six years old at the time of the Quit India Movement in 1942. So how could he have been a part of the movement? Twitter user Janardan Mishra tweeted this photo with the same claim. It was retweeted by 1,374 handles at the time of writing. (Archive link)

Twitter user ‘हम लोग We The People’ also promoted the clipping and accompanying claim. (Archive link)

Numerous Facebook users promoted the image with the same claim. (Link 1, Link 2, Link 3)

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The image is viral across Facebook and Twitter.

Fact-check

We noticed that that the article’s byline says ‘Affan Nomani’. Alt News found a tweet by Nomani dated October 6, 2021, using a keyword search. He had shared the clipping in his tweet.

However, nowhere does his article claim that Mir Taj Mohammad Khan was 30 years old when his son Shah Rukh was born. It says, “Peshawar-born Mir Taj Mohammad Khan left the city before the Partition at the age of 16 and came to Delhi. He joined Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s movement and participated in the war of independence.”

In 2014, Shah Rukh Khan had tweeted about his father’s birth anniversary. “If he were alive today, he would have been 87 years old,” the actor had written, which means he was born in 1927.

We performed a keyword search on Facebook and found a post dated June 5, 2021, featuring a purported photo of Mir Taj Mohammad Khan’s gravestone, according to which he was born on October 27, 1927, in Peshawar.

In a series of tweets, Nomani also debunked the viral claim that Mir Taj Mohammad Khan was six years old during the Quit India Movement. He was 16, he wrote. (Link 1, Link 2)

Shah Rukh Khan’s father was born in 1927, which would make him about 15 years old when he participated in the Quit India movement in 1942.

A book about Shah Rukh Khan ‘King of Bollywood‘ also talks about his father. Alt News accessed the book via Google Books. The Quit India movement which began in August 1942 led to the arrest of 60,000 people, including Congress leaders and Mir Taj Mohammad Khan, who was in and out of jail for the next two years. He arrived in Delhi in 1946 and began studying law at Delhi University.

Another book titled ‘Shahrukh Khan – The Story of the Man‘ mentions that no one knows when Mir Taj Mohammad Khan joined the ‘Khudai Khidmatgar’ organisation. However, Shah Rukh was quoted as saying that his father was referred to as the youngest freedom fighter.

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About the Author

Kinjal Parmar holds a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology. However, her keen interest in journalism, drove her to pursue journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication. At Alt News since 2019, she focuses on authentication of information which includes visual verification, media misreports, examining mis/disinformation across social media. She is the lead video producer at Alt News and manages social media accounts for the organization.