By Mohammed Kudrati
An old video from 2019, where a woman is seen telling Congress leader and Member of Parliament Rahul Gandhi about her experience post abrogation of Article 370 on a flight, is being shared with a false claim that she is a Kashmiri Hindu living abroad asking why he is opposed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the Kashmir issue.
BOOM found that the video is from August 24, 2019, a little less than three weeks after Article 370 of the Constitution was abrogated on August 5 and shows passengers in a flight leaving Srinagar speaking to Gandhi. The woman in the video, is not asking Gandhi why he does not support Kashmiri Pandits but was in fact narrating her and the ordeal many Kashmiris were facing because of the lockdown imposed on the state by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
The video in question was originally shared by the Twitter handle of the Organiser, the mouthpiece of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and is being shared with claim, "Kashmiri Hindus living abroad surrounded Rahul Gandhi while travelling in an airplane and asked why he opposed Narendra Modi on Kashmir isses."
An archive of the tweet can be found here.
The video was also tweeted by filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri, but was later deleted. He made and released the movie 'The Kashmir Files' on the issue of Kashmiri Pandits, and often raises the issue on social media.
BOOM found several posts on social media sharing this with Hindi claims.
The claim can be found below.
Posts can be seen below.
FactCheck
BOOM found that the video is from 2019 and happened on a flight leaving Srinagar, less than three weeks after Article 370 and 35A were abrogated, which gave the former state of Jammu and Kashmir a special status in the Indian polity.
BOOM confirmed with a reporter who was present on the same flight that the video is from August 2019, with the flight going in the morning but returning three hours later on the same day. The flight also had leaders like Sitaram Yechury and Ghulam Nabi Azad.
This video was quote tweeted by Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Rahul Gandhi's sister and a General Secretary within the Congress, and was originally tweeted by journalist Arun Kumar Singh.
Singh has the caption on the tweet, "श्रीनगर से वापस आते वक्त फ्लाइट में एक महिला RahulGandhi से अपनी मुश्किल बताते हुए।" (translated: "on the flight from Srinagar, a woman telling Rahul Gandhi about her problems").
Gandhi Vadra also tweeted the video with a similar caption
The same was also aired by various news channels including ABP news and NDTV
Similarly, ABP news' reporting can be found here.
It can also be seen reported here by Outlook and India Today.
While BOOM was not able to independently verify whether the woman seen speaking in the video is a Kashmiri Pandit, we were able to confirm that she is not chastising Rahul Gandhi but telling him about the plight of Kashmiris in Srinagar because of the lockdown imposed due to the abrogation of Article 370.
