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A 17-second-long video of Rahul Gandhi’s speech where the Congress leader can be heard saying, “India does not need Army, Navy, Air force” is viral on social media. An investigation by Newschecker found the claim to be taken out of context and hence misleading.
Facebook page, ‘India With MODI’ shared the video with the caption, “India can save Entire defence budget listening to Rahul Ji’s Advice.” The video has garnered over 20,000 views on the page.
In the video, Gandhi can be heard saying, “If you use India’s Labourers, India’s Farmers, India’s Workers, you will not need the Army, Navy and the Air Force to be standing over there. China will not have the guts to come inside.”
Using Crowd Tangle -a tool to analyse social media platforms- we found the video has been viewed tens of thousands of times on Facebook, with over 400 shares in the last two days.
The video was also shared by Twitter user @rishibagree with the same caption. The video posted on October 18 has almost 20,000 views on the platform.
Factcheck/Verification
To investigate the claim, Newschecker ran a keyword search for ‘India does not need Army, Navy, Air force Rahul Gandhi’ on YouTube and found a two-minute forty-six-second video by ANI News.
Through ANI’s video, we found that Gandhi delivered this speech in Erode, Tamil Nadu on January 24.
On running a YouTube search for ‘Rahul Gandhi Erode speech,’ Newschecker found a video titled, ‘Interaction with weaver community at Odanilai, Erode’ posted by Gandhi’s official YouTube channel.
On listening to the hour-long speech, Newschecker found that Gandhi’s statements on the Indian economy during his interaction with local weavers was shared out of context.
In his speech, the MP from Wayanad blames the weak economy for Chinese intrusions on the borders and claims, the centre favours only a handful of businessmen and has let down the working class.
It is in this context that Rahul Gandhi can be heard saying, “You are using the Indian Army, the Indian Navy, the Indian Air Force to protect India from China. If you use India’s labourers, India’s farmers, India’s workers, you will not need the Army, Navy and Air Force to be standing over there. China will not have the guts to come inside,” at 17 minutes and 12 seconds in the video.
Further, we found several media reports on Gandhi’s speech which also provides the context of his words. The reports can be accessed here and here.
Conclusion:
A snippet from Rahul Gandhi’s January 2021 speech went viral without context and hence is misleading.
Result: Misleading
Our Sources:
Rahul Gandhi’s full speech
Media Reports by LiveMint and ANI
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