Recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was under fire for invoking anti-Muslim tropes in a speech at his campaign rally in Rajasthan. Amidst the controversy Lighthouse Journalism found a video of former CM of Madhya Pradesh Kamal Nath being shared on the social media platforms. In the video the politician is seen promising a mosque and reinstatement of Article 370 to the Muslims in a meeting. In our investigation we found that the audio-video is a deepfake. The video is real, which is superimposed with a deepfake audio.
Claim:
X user @pradeepthakur_4 shared the video on his profile.
Check the archive version of this post.
Other users too are sharing the same claim.
Investigation:
We started the investigation by using Google search using terms, ‘Kamal Nath meet with Muslims’.
During this we found a video uploaded on YouTube channel of InKhabar Official.
The video, titled, ‘Congress Leader Kamal Nath in Close Door Meeting With Muslims Against RSS‘ was uploaded five years ago.
Kamal Nath said in the video, “What are the RSS voters doing? I have information. RSS workers have been spread all over. If we talk about Chhindwara, people will come and tell me, since Chhindwara is near Nagpur it is very convenient for them. They can come in the morning and be back in Nagpur at night.” He is further seen saying, “They just have two lines to speak. If you want to vote for Hindus, vote for Hindu Tiger. And if you want to vote for Muslims, vote for the Congress party. This is their strategy. You have to be extremely careful. They will try to instigate you. We will deal with them later. But till the day of elections, you have to tolerate them.”
We found several news reports too from 2018 when the video went viral on social media platforms.
In the next step of investigation we uploaded the audio extracted from the video in itisaar.ai, an AI tool that was developed in collaboration with IIT Jodhpur. Through the analysis of the audio, the tool found out that the video was a product of deepfake audio. The original video was superimposed with a deepfake audio.
Conclusion: Viral video where Congress leader Kamal Nath is seen promising the land of mosque and reinstatement of Article 370 is fake. Former CM of Madhya Pradesh, Kamal Nath did not make any such promises. The original video is from 2018, when he conducted a meeting with the people of Muslim community urging them to vote for Congress. AI audio was superimposed on the original video. Viral video is fake.
