Claim: A video on social media shows Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi criticising the Pakistani government after Imran Khan’s ouster.
Fact: The claim is misleading because the video was from 2019, when Khan was in power and Modi criticised him during his election campaign.
On 11 January 2023, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) member and lawmaker Senator Azam Khan Swati posted a video on Twitter with an Urdu caption:
“رجیم چینج کے سہولت کارو۔ سنو انڈیا کا مودی پاکستان کے بارے میں کیا کہہ رہا ہے؟ اگر غیرت نام کی کوئ چیز تم میں نہیں تو شرم تو کرو؟ پاکستان کے لوگو: اس لئے اپنے اس ملک کو بچانے کا واحد راستہ عمران خان کے سنگ حقیقی آزادی ہے.”
Translated [To the facilitators of regime change. Can you hear what India’s Modi is saying about Pakistan? If there is no honour in you, then you should be ashamed. People of Pakistan: this is why Imran Khan’s real freedom is the only way to save this country.]
The 15-second clip shows Indian PM Modi claiming that India has “driven out all of Pakistan’s fake bluster”. He further says “I forced them to carry a bowl and beg all over the world”.
The video shared by Swati implies that Modi’s comments are about the coalition government which came into power after Khan was ousted through the vote of no confidence in April 2022.
Fact or Fiction?
A reverse image search of the video keyframes on TinEye shows a Twitter video posted by the Indian news agency Asian News International (ANI) published on 21 April 2019. The video caption reads, “Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Barmer, Rajasthan: India has stopped the policy of getting scared of Pakistan’s threats. Every other day they used to say, “We’ve nuclear button, we’ve nuclear button”…..What do we have then? Have we kept it for Diwali?”
Another TinEye result shows that the clip is from a longer video that was posted by the Indian news outlet The Economic Times on YouTube. The clip corresponds to the 02:09 mark of the YouTube video.
Soch Fact Check further investigated the matter and found that Modi gave this speech in the 2019 reelection campaign in Rajasthan.
India’s ruling party, Bhartiya Janta Party, also uploaded the full speech on the same day, and Modi’s comments against Pakistan can be seen at the 34:31 mark of the video.
Virality
An organic search on Facebook shows that the false claim was shared here, here, here, here, here and here between 9 – 20 January 2023.
The false claim was first shared on TikTok here, here, and here, where it went viral. The video on Tiktok received 3719 likes, 1880 shares, and 500 comments.
Conclusion: Pro-PTI accounts shared a 2019 video of Indian PM Modi criticising Imran Khan’s government with misleading claims that associate it with the current government in Pakistan.