Fact Check: BJP’s Manoj Tiwari Didn’t Concede Defeat to Congress’ Kanhaiya Kumar, Cropped Video Goes Viral

Manoj Tiwari is running for Lok Sabha from the North-East Delhi seat. He is currently a Member of Parliament. People in this district went to the polls on May 25. Kanhaiya Kumar, a Congress leader and former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, is Tiwari’s major opponent in this election. Other candidates are also running.

At the same time, a video is going viral on social media sites that says Manoj Tiwari has admitted loss to the Congress candidate. As Tiwari talks from a moving car in the 11-second clip, “Look, I knew I had lost, but the sad thing was that I had been winning for a long time, and then I felt like I was about to lose,” The Hindi text on top of the picture says, “Manoj Tiwari has accepted his defeat.”

“The dancer accepted defeat even before the elections. How will he cross 400 like this?,” the Facebook post says. The star is Brother Kanhaiya Kumar — this is a rough translation from Hindi.

CHECK FACTS

The NM team found the full version of the popular video on the Jist YouTube channel. It was posted on March 31, 2024, with the title “I Spent A Day With Manoj Tiwari To Discuss Pyar, Cricket, Rahul Gandhi, Modi & Kejriwal | Part-1.” The part that was used in the popular video can be found between 34:04 and 34:14.

Tiwari is talking to a reporter in the tape, and around the 28-minute mark, he starts to think about the 2009 general elections. At that point, he wasn’t part of any party. In Lucknow, he even raised money for Congress. Tiwari remembers that Amar Singh, a well-known politician and SP general secretary, got him into the party.

At around the 31:10 mark, Tiwari says that he initially didn’t want to run for office as an SP candidate, but Amar Singh finally convinced him to do so. This persuasion took place at a party where famous people like star Amitabh Bachchan and businessman Anil Ambani were present. Tiwari remembers having doubts about running against BJP leader Yogi Adityanath in the 2009 elections in Gorakhpur because he had ties to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), which is the BJP’s student branch. He talks about a time when he ran away to Mumbai during the campaign to avoid Adityanath and the loss that was certain to happen. But he was caught and sent back.

Tiwari says at 34:04, “Look, I knew I was going to lose, but the sad thing was that I had been winning for a long time; I felt like I was about to lose.” He also says, “But even in that loss, there was a victory because of Yogi Adityanath, who stood for Hindu culture, civilization, and Sanatan culture.” At the time, we didn’t know that Narendra Modi would become prime minister. It was 2009, people. Everyone in the country could see that there was full political instability in 2009. The viral clip left out this part, which makes it clear that he was talking about the 2009 elections, to make it look like he gave up in the current Lok Sabha polls.

In the 2009 General Elections, the actor-turned-politician ran for office for the first time as a candidate for the Samajwadi Party in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. He was running against Yogi Adityanath, who has been the MP for Gorakhpur since 1998. Despite this, Tiwari failed and only got about 83,000 votes. Yogi Adityanath got more than 400,000 votes, and Vinay Shankar Tiwari of the Bahujan Samaj Party got 182,000 votes. After becoming a member of the BJP, Tiwari won his first Lok Sabha seat in 2014.

Since the video was cut off, it has been shared out of context, which has led to false claims that Manoj Tiwari gave up the election for Lok Sabha in 2024.