A viral video featuring Tamil Nadu BJP president K Annamalai has sparked controversy with the claim that it shows Annamalai disparaging Hindu nationalist ideologue VD Savarkar.

In the video, Annamalai could be heard saying, “Savarkar, it is generally said about him that he licked the boots of the Englishman. (translated from Tamil)”

The Tamil text on the 11-second video clip read ‘The lamb revealing the truth. (translated from Tamil)’ The video clip also included a scene from the Malayalam movie ‘Kaalapaani’, where actor Mohanlal is seen licking a British officer’s boot, describing what Annamalai was saying in the video allegedly about Savarkar.

An X user shared the video claiming that Annamalai made the remarks about Savarkar before joining the BJP. The caption read, “I was looking for this video for two days. Aadu Annamalai before joining BJP! (Translated from Tamil)”

Another X user has shared the video with the caption “The lamb unveiled the truth about Savarkar…”

Fact Check

NewsMeter found that the claim is misleading as the video clip has been edited to remove the context.

By using relevant keywords, we found the extended version of the clip on the YouTube channel Inside Tamil titled ‘Thiru. Annamalai l Press Meet l BJP l Savarkar Book Published.’ It was published on October 2, 2021.

The video shows the launch of a book on Savarkar for which Annamalai was the chief guest. Prabha Khaitan Foundation, the book’s publisher, shared the details of the book launch on X.

At the 6:28-minute mark in the YouTube video, while responding to a media question about Savarkar, Annamalai said, “In Tamil Nadu, when people discuss Veer Savarkar, they often criticise him right away. They call him an apologist. I don’t want to use that word. In Tamil Nadu, they usually say British boot licker. People say that Veer Savarkar licked the boots of the Englishman. But does that comment really do justice to the man?”

The viral clip only featured Annamalai’s ‘boot lick’ statement while editing out the context making it look like he was criticising Savarkar. However, throughout the press conference, Annamalai could be seen stating that Savarkar was innocent and that his actions were not wrong.

Those sharing the clip claim that Annamalai made the ‘negative comments’ about Savarkar before joining the BJP. However, Annamalai joined the BJP on August 25, 2020, and the video is from 2021, a year after he joined the party.

Hence, the video of Annamalai ‘criticising’ Savarkar is edited and is being shared without context. The claim is misleading.

Claim Review: The video shows TN BJP state president K Annamalai making disparaging remarks about Savarkar, calling him a ‘boot licker of the British.’

Claimed By: X

Claim Reviewed By: NewsMeter

Claim Source: X users

Claim Fact Check: False

Fact: The claim is misleading. In the original extended video, Annamalai was refuting allegations made against Savarkar.

(This story was originally published by NewsMeter, and republished by NDTV as part of the Shakti Collective)

A video of Home Minister Amit Shah is being shared with a misleading claim that he has said election promises made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi hold no meaning and are forgotten after the polls are over.

What’s the claim

A purported video of Home Minister Amit Shah is being shared on social media with a claim that he said there is no meaning to the promises made during elections, implying that he was referring to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In the six-second clip, Shah can be heard saying, “That’s why I say there is no meaning to this ‘guarantee’. They say it during elections and then forget.”

Sharing the video, a user on X (formerly Twitter) wrote that this is a poll gimmick and urged the voters to be careful, adding that this is a “big expose on #ModikiGuarantee by Amit Shah.” Archived versions of such posts can be found here and here. The clip has also gained traction on Facebook and Instagram, where users have said that Mr Shah himself “exposed” his party.

However, this is misleading. In the original video, Mr Shah was referring to the guarantees made by the Indian National Congress (INC) and not by the prime minister.

What we found

The video is a small segment from Amit Shah’s recent interview to Smita Prakash, editor-in-chief of news agency Asian News International (ANI). The original video was published on the agency’s official YouTube channel (archived here) on May 15, 2024.

During the interview, at the 25:15 minute mark, Ms Prakash asked Mr Shah about Congress’ guarantees which he had previously referred to as “Chinese Guarantees”. In response, he said, “I called it “Chinese guarantee” on the basis of its durability.” He then said, “I just went to Telangana. The women there are still waiting for their Rs 12,000, the farmers are waiting for their loan waivers, and the girls are waiting for their promised scooters. These were guarantees made by Rahul ji. Now you try to find Rahul ji.”

Ms Prakash then goes on to say that the elections in the southern part are over and Rahul Gandhi has moved to the northern part of the country. Following this, at 26:05 minute mark, Mr Shah made the statement featured in the viral video, saying, “But even when he was in the South, he would make promises, which is why I say that this guarantee is meaningless. They say it during elections and then forget.”

There’s no mention of Mr Shah saying “Modi ki Guarantee” anywhere before or after he made the viral remark. ANI also shared this part of Mr Shah’s interview from May 15, 2024, on their official X channel (archived here).

The verdict

This clip has been clipped to misrepresent Amit Shah’s original remarks. Originally, Mr Shah was accusing the Congress party for not fulfilling their poll promises. Therefore, we have marked this claim as misleading.

(This story was originally published by Logically Facts and republished by NDTV as part of the Shakti Collective)

New Delhi:

A viral video featuring BJP MP and actor Manoj Tiwari is circulating on social media claiming that the leader has already conceded defeat against the Congress candidate even as his constituency is yet to vote.

The video features a Hindi text overlay that translates to: “Manoj Tiwari has accepted defeat.”

In the 11-second clip, Mr Tiwari, speaking to a journalist in a moving car, says, “Look, I was aware of my defeat, but the sad thing was that I had been winning for a long time, and then I felt like I was about to lose (translated from Hindi).”

On X, the video was shared with captions that read: “The dancer accepted defeat even before the elections. How will the BJP cross 400 (seats) like this? Kanhaiya Kumar is amazing.”

One such post has amassed over 39,000 views at the time of writing. Archived versions of these posts can be found here and here.

Manoj Tiwari is contesting the Lok Sabha elections from the North East Delhi constituency, which he currently represents as a Member of Parliament. The constituency will vote on May 25, when Mr Tiwari will face Kanhaiya Kumar, a Congress leader and former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, among other candidates.

However, a clip of Manoj Tiwari talking about his unsuccessful 2009 contest has been misinterpreted to claim he has purportedly accepted defeat against Mr Kumar in the ongoing polls.

What Did We Find?

Upon spotting the ‘Jist’ watermark in the viral video, we tracked its extended version on the Jist YouTube channel. This video (archived here) was uploaded on March 31. The video, titled “I Spent A Day With Manoj Tiwari To Discuss Pyar, Cricket, Rahul Gandhi, Modi & Kejriwal | Part-1,” runs for about an hour and 11 minutes. The viral segment appears between the 34:04 mark and the 34:14 timestamps.

The video is of Mr Tiwari interacting with a journalist, and around the 28-minute mark in this clip, Mr Tiwari delves into the 2009 general elections. He mentions that he was initially unaffiliated with any party and even campaigned for money for his now-rival Congress in Lucknow. He recounts how Amar Singh, a politician who served as the general secretary of the Samajwadi Party (SP), brought him into his party.

Around the 31:10 mark, Mr Tiwari says that despite his initial hesitation, he agreed to contest the election as an SP candidate after being urged by Amar Singh at a gathering that included actor Amitabh Bachchan and businessman Anil Ambani.

Further, he recalls his hesitance to contest the 2009 elections against BJP leader Yogi Adityanath in Gorakhpur due to his past affiliation with Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the BJP. He also narrates an incident where he fled to Mumbai during the campaign to evade facing Yogi Adityanath and the fear of his inevitable defeat, only to be caught and forced to return.

Then, around the 34:04 mark, Mr Tiwari says, “Look, I was aware of my defeat. But the sad thing was that I had been winning for a long time. I felt like I was about to lose.”

He then says, “But even in that defeat, there was a victory because of Yogi Adityanath, who stood for Hindu culture, civilization, and Sanatan culture… We didn’t know that Narendra Modi would become the country’s Prime Minister at the time. I’m talking about 2009. In 2009, you could see there was a situation of complete political instability throughout the country.”

This bit, where it is clear that he was referring to the 2009 elections, has been omitted from the viral clip to make it appear that he conceded defeat in the ongoing Lok Sabha elections.

2009 General Elections

Manoj Tiwari began his political career in Gorakhpur in 2009 when he ran as a Samajwadi Party candidate. He contested against Yogi Adityanath – now the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, who had consistently represented Gorakhpur in Parliament since 1998, as reported by NDTV.

However, Mr Tiwari was unsuccessful in his Parliament bid at the time, securing only around 83,000 votes. Yogi Adityanath had polled over four lakh votes, and Bahujan Samaj Party’s Vinay Shankar Tiwari got 1.82 lakh votes. Mr Tiwari first won the Lok Sabha election in 2014 after he joined the BJP.

The Verdict

In the original video, Mr Tiwari discusses the 2009 general elections, which he had contested against Yogi Adityanath in Gorakhpur. This segment has been cropped and shared out of context to claim that he has already conceded defeat in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

A video of Prime Minister Narendra Modi criticising Sam Pitroda, the former chairman of the Indian Overseas Congress, over alleged racist remarks, has been altered and shared to falsely claim that Modi called President Droupadi Murmu dark skinned.

In a May 2, 2024, interview with The Statesman, Pitroda while trying to give an analogy for India’s diversity said that people from different regions of India resemble Chinese, Arab, White, and African races. He emphasised that despite these differences, Indians have lived together harmoniously for 70-75 years. After this interview, Pitroda was criticised for his remarks, and the Congress party distanced itself from his comments. On May 8, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh announced that Pitroda had resigned from his position in the Indian Overseas Congress.

In 15 seconds video, Modi can be heard saying, “Those who have black skin, they are all from Africa. Droupadi Murmu is also African, and because she has dark skin that’s why she should be defeated”.

The viral video is also being shared on Facebook with the same false claim.

FACT-CHECK

BOOM found that the viral video has been cropped from a longer video of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech and has been doctored to change its meaning. In the full speech, Modi criticised Sam Pitroda for alleged racist remarks and claimed that Congress opposed President Droupadi Murmu’s candidature because of her skin color. The viral clip has been culled from a video posted on May 8, 2024 by BJP’s official YouTube channel. From the 44 minutes timestamp, Modi can be heard saying, “I got to know that there is an uncle in America who is the philosophical guide of ‘Shehzada’ and just like the third umpire in cricket this ‘Shehzada’ takes advice from the third umpire. This philosophical uncle said that those who have black skin are from Africa. This means that you are abusing several people in the country on the basis of their skin colour.”

The viral clip has been culled from a video posted on May 8, 2024 by BJP’s official YouTube channel. From the 44 minutes timestamp, Modi can be heard saying, “I got to know that there is an uncle in America who is the philosophical guide of ‘Shehzada’ and just like the third umpire in cricket this ‘Shehzada’ takes advice from the third umpire. This philosophical uncle said that those who have black skin are from Africa. This means that you are abusing several people in the country on the basis of their skin colour.” “Then I understood, that looking at the color of the skin, they (Congress) assumed that Droupadi Murmu is African, and because her skin color is black, that’s why we (Congress) should defeat her,” he further alleged.

The part before this has been edited out of the viral video to make the false claim that Modi called Murmu dark skinned. The full speech can be seen here.

(This story was originally published by BOOM, and republished by NDTV as part of the Shakti Collective)

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

An image purportedly showing an advertisement by the Indian dairy cooperative society Amul, featuring the Amul girl with the following Hindi text, “Vote or don’t vote, take the right decision. Your vote is priceless”, is being widely shared on social media platforms. The image was shared by Kiran Bedi, former lieutenant governor of Puducherry, on X (formerly Twitter). The post was viewed more than 14,000 times at the time of filing this story. 

The image has also gained widespread traction on Facebook. One Facebook user wrote in Hindi, “Your vote is priceless !! Truly the taste of India.”  

However, this viral advertisement is fake.

What we found

Amul called the advertisement “fake” and issued a statement on its official X handle (archive here) on May 6, 2024. The statement read, “We wish to inform you that a fake message featuring the Amul Girl is being shared on WhatsApp and social media. This advertisement has not been created by Amul. In the said post, the name of the creator of this fake advertisement is mentioned as “p kanil”, against whom Amul will take legal action. Amul strongly urges all voters to vote in the ongoing elections and strengthen our democracy. We also request you to kindly share this fake advertisement alert with those who have shared the fake message with you (sic).”

Issued in Public Interest by Amul pic.twitter.com/fZTgLySyZq

— Amul.coop (@Amul_Coop) May 6, 2024

Further, all of Amul’s cartoon advertisements are available on its website (archive here) under the section called “Amul Hits”. And despite an extensive search, we could not locate the now-viral ad on the website.

Additionally, Amul has released just three ads related to the ongoing 2024 Lok Sabha elections. The first ad (archive here) was issued during the first phase of polling on April 19, followed by a second ad (archive here) during the second phase on April 25, and the latest one (archive here) was shared during the third phase on May 6.

All official ads by Amul feature the “Amul – The Taste of India” logo, which is noticeably absent in the viral image. This absence raises questions about the authenticity of the image and its association with Amul’s official advertising campaigns.

The verdict

This viral image falsely depicts the Amul girl in the viral ad to give the impression that Amul has created the ad. This ad was not created or published by Amul. 

(This story was originally published by Logically Facts, and republished by NDTV as part of the Shakti Collective.)

“You are more microbes than human.”

It is possible you have had this factoid thrown at you, with the thrower claiming that the microbes in our bodies outnumber our own cells 10 to one.

But according to an assessment published in Nature Microbiology, this is a myth. In a 2016 study the assessment’s authors cited, researchers from Israel and Canada estimated a 70 kg “reference man” to have 38 trillion bacterial cells and 30 trillion human cells. Most current estimates of the size of the gut microbiome are also based on adults living in the urban areas of high-income countries, they added.

The authors, Alan Walker, senior research fellow at the Rowett Institute, University of Aberdeen, and Lesly Hoyles, professor of microbiome and systems biology, Nottingham Trent University, poked holes into this and 11 other popular claims that assail the human microbiome – the community of microbes living in the human body.

In the last two decades, microbiome research has gone from a “niche subject area” to “one of the hottest topics in all of science,” Dr. Hoyles said. The flip side of this is “hype and a temptation to over-simplify the really complex microbial interactions and activities occurring in our guts”.

Varun Aggarwala, assistant professor of biomedical and life sciences at Jio Institute, Navi Mumbai, who studies microbiome therapeutics, described the assessment as a “timely intervention that can bring nuance to the field of microbiomes.”

Here are the 11 other claims the article checked:

1. The age of the field

One of the more benign misconceptions the assessment takes aim at is that microbiome research is a new field. But according to the authors, scientists had described bacteria inhabiting the gut, such as Escerichia coli and Bifidobacteria, and speculated on their benefits in the late 19th and early 20th centuries itself.

2. Who named the field?

Many have credited Joshua Lederberg, a medicine Nobel laureate, with naming the field in 2001. But researchers had used the term in its modern form more than a decade earlier. According to a June 2017 paper that the authors cite, Whipps J.M., Lewis K., and Cooke R.C. used the term in 1988 to describe a community of microbes in a book.

3. The real number of microbes

Some of the more prevalent and more harmful myths concern the size of the microbiome. The absolute microbial cell numbers in one gram of human faeces have been exaggerated 10- to 100-fold. The actual number is around 10¹⁰-10¹², according to the authors.

4. The mass of the microbiome

Many research articles have stated that the human microbiota weigh 1-2 kg, but it only weighs about half a kg or less, the authors wrote. The 2016 study by Israeli and Canadian researchers estimated that it weighed about 200 grams.

5. From mother to child

Contrary to some opinions, mothers don’t pass their microbiomes to their children at birth. Some microorganisms are directly transferred during birth but they constitute a small fraction of the human microbiota. A smaller fraction of these microbes also survives and persists through the child’s life. “Every adult ends up with a unique microbiota configuration, even identical twins that are raised in the same household,” the authors noted.

6. Good or bad?

Some researchers have suggested (see here, here, and here, e.g.) that diseases are caused by undesirable interactions between microbial communities and our cells. But the authors wrote that whether a microbe and its metabolite are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depends on the context. For example, most humans carry a species of bacteria called Clostridium difficile without any diseases for life. It causes problems only in the elderly or in people with compromised immune systems.

They acknowledged that diseases have been correlated with changes in the composition of the microbiome and that such changes could exacerbate some diseases (like inflammatory bowel disease). But they added that it is “extremely difficult” to implicate a specific profile of microbes, or changes to them, in a disease.

7. The firmicutes-bacteroidetes ratio

One myth correlates obesity with the ratio of two phyla of bacteria, firmicutes and bacteroidetes. The problem: the level of phyla is too broad to comment on effects with confidence. A phylum is a group within a kingdom. In the descending order of classifying organisms, a kingdom comprises different phyla; a phylum comprises classes; then there are orders, families, genuses, and, finally, species. Even within a bacterial species, several strains behave differently, causing the host to manifest different clinical symptoms. 

8. Not redundant

Some researchers have swung the other way, claiming that different microbes are actually functionally redundant. But the authors wrote that while different bacteria in the human microbiome perform some common important functions, many functions are the preserve of a few species.

9. Sequencing is not necessarily unbiased

The authors noted that the notion that “sequencing is unbiased” is a misconception – that biases can be introduced at various stages of studies based on the microbes’ genetic material, from collecting samples to storing them, even in the choice of software to analyse sequence data.

10. The standards question

According to the authors, there is a common opinion in microbiome research that researchers need standardised methods so that they can compare the findings of different studies. But the assessment stressed that no methodology is perfect and that adopting one universal methodology would come at the cost of turning a blind eye to the limitations of the chosen method.

11. The culturable microbiome

Is it difficult to grow microbes from the human microbiome in the lab? Yes, many say, but the authors pointed to work in the 1970s when scientists cultured diverse microbiome species from the gut. “So current gaps in culture collections are at least in part attributable to a lack of previous effort rather than an inherent ‘unculturability’,” they noted.

Joel P. Joseph is a freelance science journalist and researcher.