Fact Check: Rahul Gandhi Not Resigning From Congress, Viral Video Manipulates Reality

What is the claim?

A video of Rahul Gandhi, a Congress member of parliament, has been shared a lot on social media. The video says that he quit the party because he is looking forward to the Lok Sabha polls, which will happen on April 19, 2024.

Gandhi can be heard saying in Hindi, “I, Rahul Gandhi, am resigning from the Congress today.” The video was shared on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. I can’t act like I’m only a certain kind of Hindu. After the Nyay Yatra, I put out a “Nyay report,” but Modiji is jailing people who are crooked. Soon, those who are dishonest will go to jail under Modi’s rule. That’s why I’m going to Italy to visit my grandfather. You can find old versions of this post here. The video was also posted on YouTube, and you can watch an old copy of it here.

Deepfake audio, on the other hand, has been used to change the film.

How Did We Verify This?

We carefully looked over the popular video and noticed that the sound doesn’t match up with Gandhi’s lip movements. This makes us think that the video may have been messed with.

We were able to find a video report by The Indian Express that was posted on their YouTube page on April 3, 2024. In the video called “Rahul Gandhi Files Nomination Papers From Kerala’s Wayanad | Lok Sabha Election 2024,” he is seen holding and signing a paper at 0:38 seconds, which is the same time as the video that went viral.

With the help of keywords, we were able to find the film Gandhi first posted on his X (formerly Twitter) account on April 3, 2024. In the caption, he said that he had made his nomination from Wayanad, a constituency in Kerala, a coastal state, for the 2024 general elections.

Gandhi is heard saying in the video posted on his X account, “I, Rahul Gandhi, having been nominated as a candidate to fill a seat in the House of the People, do solemnly affirm that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India as by law established and that I will uphold the sovereignty and integrity of India.”

Notification of Gandhi’s departure from the Congress has not been made public. Such an announcement would have been all over the news, but we couldn’t find any evidence that he did anything like that.

The video in the viral post hasn’t been changed, but there are some problems with it and between the original audio and the audio in the viral post. These problems suggest that an AI voice clone tool was used to spread the false news that Gandhi quit Congress.

The verdict

The video going popular of Rahul Gandhi announcing his resignation from the Congress party has been tampered with by adding fake sound on top of it. In the first video, he signed the registration paper from Wayanad, Kerala, and he didn’t say that he was leaving Congress. That’s why we marked this claim as false.