Authors
Kushel HM is a mechanical engineer-turned-journalist, who loves all things football, tennis and films. He was with the news desk at the Hindustan Times, Mumbai, before joining Newschecker.
Several social media users are circulating a photo, which we have received on our Whatsapp tipline, too, claiming a “Congress conspiracy” behind the recent controversial BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while stating that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi met the documentary’s producer during his time in the UK last year.
The archived versions of the tweets can be seen here, here and here.
Fact check
Newschecker saw that the people in the photo with Rahul Gandhi were Indian entrepreneur Sam Pitroda, along with UK MP and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Upon doing a relevant keyword search, we were led to multiple media reports, seen here, here and here, on the 2022 meeting in London, which had sparked a political row.
According to an India Today report, dated May 24, 2022, the BJP criticised Gandhi over his photo with Corbyn, following the party’s rift with the “anti-India” MP stemming from his “numerous tweets on the situation in Jammu and Kashmir, which India has persistently maintained is an internal matter”. Pitroda, a close aide of the Gandhi family for years, reportedly told India Today TV: “He (Corbyn) is a personal friend of mine and came over for a cup of tea at the hotel. There’s nothing political about this.”
We learnt that the photo was first tweeted out by the Indian Overseas Congress on May 23, 2022.
We then looked up the credits of “India: The Modi Question”, the first episode of which was aired on January 17, 2023, on IMDb and BBC. We learnt that the series producer was Richard Cookson and executive producer Mike Radford. Taking a cue from this, we ran a keyword search for “Rahul Gandhi Richard Cookson Mike Radford”, which did not throw up any relevant results or photos of such a meeting.
We reached out to the BBC, where a spokesperson said, “Nobody from the production team met with Rahul Gandhi.”
UPDATE: This article was updated on 28/01/2023 to include the response from BBC.
Conclusion
A 2022 photo of Rahul Gandhi with Jeremy Corbyn went viral with the claim that he met the producer of the controversial BBC documentary on PM Narendra Modi.
Result: False
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Authors
Kushel HM is a mechanical engineer-turned-journalist, who loves all things football, tennis and films. He was with the news desk at the Hindustan Times, Mumbai, before joining Newschecker.
