Amid the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, a video of Home Minister Amit Shah purportedly calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election guarantees meaningless and saying that he forgets about them once the elections are over is being widely shared across social media platforms (here, here, & here).
In the video, we see Shah saying in Hindi, “I say that these guarantees have no meaning; they say this till the elections and then forget it.”
Fact: This viral video is clipped. Part of Shah’s statement has been cropped and is being shared out of context. The original video, uploaded on the official YouTube channel of ANI on 15 May 2024, shows him talking about the Congress’ guarantees and calling them meaningless. Hence, the claim made in the post is false.
To check the authenticity of the viral claim, we conducted a Google reverse image search using keyframes from the video. This search led us to an interview video of Amit Shah shared on the official YouTube channel of ANI on 15 May 2024, titled “Amit Shah’s full interview on PoK, NDA seat prediction, Mamata, Swati Maliwal-Kejriwal & more.” In this video, we can see ANI’s editor, Smita Prakash, interviewing Shah.
Upon reviewing the entire video, we found that the viral clip of Amit Shah starts at the timestamp 26:05 and ends at 26:11. In this video, Amit Shah can be seen referring to Congress while making the statement.
At the timestamp 25:15, Smita Prakash questions Amit Shah about why he called the Congress’ guarantees ‘Chinese guarantees.’ In response, Amit Shah says in Hindi, “I just went to Telangana. The women there are waiting for their Rs 12,000, the farmers are waiting for the loan waiver of Rs 2 lakh, the girls are waiting for scooters. The promise that Rahul ji made was a guarantee. Now you find Rahul ji, they are looking for him.” Prakash responds, “Now the elections are over in the south, Rahul ji has come to the north.” After this, Amit Shah said, “He used to go when there were elections in the south. That’s why I say that his guarantee has no meaning; they say it till the elections and then forget it.”
From this, it is clear that part of Shah’s statement has been cropped and shared out of context to disseminate misinformation, suggesting he made the remark in reference to PM Modi’s guarantees.
We also found the press release details of this interview of Amit Shah on the website of the Bharatiya Janata Party. This summary also states that he made this comment while talking about Rahul Gandhi’s guarantees in Telangana.
To sum up, a clipped video is being shared with a misleading context, that Amit Shah said Modi’s 2024 election promises are ‘meaningless’.
This story was originally published by Factly as part of the Shakti Collective. Apart from the headline, excerpt and introduction, this story has not been edited by ThePrint staff.