India TV Fact Check: With assembly elections taking place in five states and the Lok Sabha elections scheduled for next year, there is a prevalent trend of taking small excerpts from leaders' speeches and statements to distort the intended meaning of their complete statements. A similar situation has emerged with a video of Home Minister Amit Shah that is going viral on social media. The video claims that Amit Shah stated that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's degrees are fake. However, upon fact-checking, it has been found that the video has been edited, and the claim is fabricated.
What is going viral?
A video is going viral on Instagram, shared by a user with the name "kamil79991." This video was posted on October 25, 2023. Nothing is written in the caption, but text has been added within the video, stating, "Modi ji's degrees are fake... Amit Shah admitted the truth." In this video, a very small part of Amit Shah's statement is shown, in which he is saying, "The degrees of Prime Minister Modi are fake... it's not true."
In addition to Instagram, many users on Facebook and Twitter are sharing this video clip with almost identical claims. It's worth noting that a few years ago, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was accused of claiming that Prime Minister Modi's degrees were fake, which stirred significant political controversy at the time.
India TV did fact check
When we received this video, upon careful examination, it became evident that it had been edited with the intent of spreading misinformation. Subsequently, we extracted a few frames from the video and conducted a reverse image search using Google Lens. In our search results, we found a video that was uploaded on the official YouTube channel of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This video is approximately 7 years old, uploaded on May 9, 2016, and is titled "Shri Amit Shah & Shri Arun Jaitley makes educational degrees of PM Modi public: 9 May 2016."
This video is, in fact, the full clip of a press conference that Amit Shah conducted in 2016 in response to allegations made by Arvind Kejriwal. In this press conference, Amit Shah, along with the late BJP leader Arun Jaitley, can be seen. During this event, Amit Shah publicly presented Prime Minister Modi's Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Master of Arts (MA) degrees.
In this context, Amit Shah fiercely addressed the allegations spread by Arvind Kejriwal and described them as unfortunate. The video of this press conference, which is approximately 7 years old and was uploaded on the Bharatiya Janata Party's official YouTube channel, contains the segment where Amit Shah appears to say, "Prime Minister Modi's degrees are fake." This specific statement can be found in the video between 1:30 and 1:36.
Following this, we conducted a search related to this on Google, and we found an NDTV article that covered the same press conference. This article was published on May 9, 2016. In the article, it is reported that Amit Shah said, "It's unfortunate that we have to clarify PM Narendra Modi's degrees. For the last few days, Arvind Kejriwal has been spreading falsehoods about PM's degree, trying to defame him. He has alleged that the PM's degrees are fake. Today, I want to show and clarify to all of you that both degrees are genuine and authentic." This clarifies the context of Amit Shah's statements and confirms that the video being circulated with an edited portion is misleading.
What came out in fact check?
When we fact-checked this video, it became clear that the viral video is a 6-second edited portion of a 7-year-old BJP press conference. The viral video is edited and the claim associated with it is false.
